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MR. PAEKER'S SERMONS 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL CONDITION 



BOSTON 



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S E 11 M O N 



MORAL CONDITION OF BOSTON, 



PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, FEB. 11, 1849, 



"BY THEODORE PARKER, 



MINISTER OF THE XXVIII. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY- CROSBY AND NICHOLS 
111 Washington Street. 

1849. 




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COOLIDGE AND WILEY, PRINTERS. WATER STREET. 



SERMON. 



"Hitherto hath the Lord helped us." — 1 Samuel, vii: 12. 

A MAN who has the Spirit of his Age can easily be a 
popular man ; if he have it in an eminent degree he must 
be a popular man in it: he has its hopes and its fears; 
his trumpet gives a certain and well known sound ; his 
counsel is readily appreciated ; the majority is on his side. 
But he cannot be a wise Magistrate, a just Judge, a com- 
petent Critic, or a profitable Preacher. A man who has 
only the spirit of a former age can be none of these four 
things ; and not even a popular man. He remembers 
when he ought to forecast, and compares when he ought 
to act ; he cannot appreciate the age he lives in, nor have 
a fellow feeling with it. He may easily obtain the pity 
of his age, not its sympathy or its confidence. The man 
who has the spirit of his own, and also that of some fu- 
ture age, is alone capable of becoming a wise Magistrate, 
a just Judge, and a profitable Preaclier. Such a man 
looks on passing events somewhat as the future historian 
will do, and sees them in their proportions, not distorted ; 
sees them in their connection with great general laws, and 
judges of the falling rain not merely by the bonnets it 
may spoil and the pastime it disturbs, but by the grass 
and corn it shall cause to grow. He has Hopes and 
Fears of his own, but they are not the hopes and fears 
of men about him ; his trumpet cannot give a welcome or 
well known sound, nor his counsel be presently heeded. 
Majorities are not on his side, nor can he be a popular 
man. 



To understand our present Moral Condition, to be able 
to give good counsel thereon, you must understand the 
former generation, and have potentially the spirit of the 
future generation ; must appreciate the Past, and yet be- 
long to the Future. Who is there that can do this ? No 
man will say, " I can." Yet conscious of the difficulty, 
and aware of my own deficiencies in all these respects, 
I will yet endeavour to speak of the Moral Condition of 
Boston. 

I. I will speak of the actual moral condition of 
Boston. Let me begin with the Morals of Trade. In 
a city like Rome, you must first feel the pulse of the 
Church, in St. Petersburg that of the Court, to deter- 
mine the moral condition of those cities. Now Trade is 
to Boston what the Church is to Rome and the Imperial 
Court to St. Petersburg : — it is the pendulum which 
regulates all the common and authorized machinery of 
the place ; it is an organization of the Public Conscience. 
We care little for any Pius the Ninth, or Nicholas the 
First ; the Dollar is our Emperor and Pope, above all 
the parties in the State, all sects in the Church, Lord 
Paramount over both, its spiritual and temporal power not 
likely to be called in question ; revolt from what else we 
may, we are loyal still to that. 

A little while ago, in a Sermon of Riches, speaking of 
the character of Trade in Boston, I suggested that men 
were better than their reputation oftener than worse ; 
that there were a hundred honest bargains to one that 
was dishonest. I have heard severe strictures on that 
statement which gave me more pain than any criticism I 
have received before. The criticism was, that I overrated 
the honesty of men in trade. Now it is a small thing to 
be convicted of an error — a just thing and a profitable 
to have it detected and exposed ; but it is a painful thing 
to find you have overrated the moral character of your 
townsmen. However, if what I said be not true as His- 
tory, I hope it will become so as Prophecy ; I doubt not 
my critics will help that work. 



Love of money is out of proportion to love of better 
tilings — to love of Justice, of Truth, of a Manly Charac- 
ter developing itself in a Mtinlj Life. Wealth is often 
made the end to live for ; not the means to live by, and 
attain a Manly Character, The young man of good 
abilities does not commonly propose it to himself to be a 
noble man, equipped with all the intellectual and moral 
qualities which belong to that, and capable of the duties 
which come thereof. He is satisfied if he can become a 
rich man. It is the highest ambition of many a youth in 
this town to become one of the rich men of Boston ; to 
have the Social Position Avhich that always gives, and 
nothing else can commonly bestow in this country. Ac- 
cordingly, our young men will sacrifice every thing to this 
one object ; will make wealth the End — and will become 
rich without becoming noble. Now wealth without noble- 
ness of character is always vulgar. I have seen a clown 
staring at himself in the gorgeous mirror of a French 
palace, and thought him no bad emblem of many an ig- 
noble man at home, surrounded by material riches which 
only reflected back the vulgarity of their owner. 

Other young men inherit wealth, but seldom regard it 
as a means of power for high and noble ends, only as the 
means of selfish indulgence ; unneeded means to elevate 
yet more their self-esteem. Now and then you find a 
man who values wealth as an instrument to serve man- 
kind withal. I know some such men ; their money is a 
blessing akin to genius, a blessing to mankind, a means 
of philanthropic power. But such men are rare in all 
countries, perhaps a little less so in Boston than in most 
other large trading towns ; still, exceeding rare. They 
are sure to meet with neglect, with abuse, and perhaps 
with scorn ; if they are men of eminent ability, superior 
culture, and most elevated moral aims, set off, too, with 
a noble and heroic life, they are sure of meeting with 
eminent hatred. I fear the man most hated in this town 
would be found to be some one who had only sought to do 
mankind some great good, and stepped before his age too 
far for its sympathy. Truth, Justice, Humanity, are not 
thought in Boston to come of good family ; their follow- 



6 

ers are not respectable. I am not speaking to blame 
men, only to sho^y the fact ; we may meddle with things 
too high for us, but not understand nor appreciate. 

Now this disproportionate love of money appears in va- 
rious w^ays. You see it in the advantage that is taken 
of the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed 
classes in the community. It is notorious that they pay 
the highest prices, the dearest rents, and are imposed 
upon in their dealings oftener than any other class of 
men ; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek 
out the sickliest sheep to pounce upon. The fact that a 
man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnishes to many 
men an argument for defrauding the man. Now it is 
bad enough to injure any man ; but to wrong an ignorant 
man, a poor and friendless man ; to take advantage of 
his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or 
his money for less than a fair return — that is petty base- 
ness under aggravated circumstances, and as cowardly as 
it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men 
telling of the arts by which they got their gold — some- 
times of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad, and a 
good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money 
meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inher- 
itance. 

This same disproportionate love of money appears in 
.the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the 
manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article 
which corrupts and ruins men by hundreds ; which has 
done more to increase Poverty, Misery, and Crime than 
any other one cause whatever ; and, as some think, more 
than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of 
•men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, 
but in its ruinous use. Yet such men by such a traffic 
never lose their standing in society, their reputation in 
trade, their character in the church. A good many men 
will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist ; men 
have lost their place in society by that name ; even Dr. 
Channing " hurt his usefulness " and " injured his repu- 
tation" by daring to speak against that Sin of the Na- 
tion ; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, im- 



porting, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of fami- 
lies — though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that 
he ministers to crime and to ruin ! I am told that large 
quantities of New England Rum have already been sent 
from this city to California ; it is notorious that much of 
it is sent to the nations of Africa — if not from Boston, 
at least from New England, — as an auxiUary in the 
slave-trade. You know with what feelings of grief and 
indignation a clergyman of this city saw that character- 
istic manufacture of this town on the wharves of a Ma- 
hometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in 
Boston who would not " get into trouble," as the phrase 
is, if they Avere to preach against Intemperance and the 
causes that produce Intemperance with half so much zeal 
as they innocently preach " regeneration " and a " form 
of piety " which will never touch a single corner of the 
earth. As the minister came down, the Spirit of Trade 
would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him : " Busi- 
ness is Business ; Religion is Religion. Business is ours, 
Religion yours ; but if you make or even alloAv Religion 
to interfere with our Business, then it will be the worse 
for you — that is all ! " You know it is not a great while 
since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister 
who was a fearless apostle of Temperance. His presence 
here was a grief to that " form of piety " ; a disturbance 
to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not 
been much disturbed by the preaching of Temperance. 
The effect has been salutary : no Unitarian minister has 
risen up to fill that place ! 

This same disproportionate love of money appears in 
the fact that the merchants of Boston still allow colored 
seamen to be taken from their ships and shut up in the 
jails of another state. If they cared as much for the 
Rights of Man as for money, as much for the men who 
sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think 
there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the 
South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bond- 
age merely for the color of his skin. No doubt, a mer- 
chant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging 
directly in the slave-trade, for it is made piracy by the 



8 

law of the land. But did any one ever lose his reputation 
by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt ; by 
becoming, in that way or by inheritance, the owner of 
slaves, and still keeping them in bondage ? 

You shall take the whole trading community of Boston, 
rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena of 
Trade as astronomers the phenomena of the Heavens, and 
from the observed facts, by the inductive method of phi- 
losophy, construct the Ethics of Trade, and you will find 
one great principle to underlie the whole : Money must be 
made. This is to the Ethics of Trade what Attraction is 
to the Material World ; what Truth is to the Intellect, and 
Justice in Morals. Other things must yield to that ; that 
to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law 
of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets 
pushed aside ; the higher, nobler qualities of a man are 
held in small esteem. 

Now this characteristic of the trading class appears in 
the thought of the people as well as their actions. You 
see it in the secular literature of our times, in the Laws, 
even in the Sermons : nobler things give way to love of 
gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where 
Violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, 
have I seen a Cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick 
and vulgar stalk, with coarse and vulgar leaves, with rank 
unsavory look ; it thrust aside the little Violet, which, un- 
derneath its impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sun- 
shine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender 
life : but above the grave of the Violet there stood the 
Cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless 
of the frost. Yet the Cabbage also had its value and its 
use. 

There are men in Boston, some rich, some poor, old 
and young, who are free from this reproach; men that 
have a Avell-proportioned love of money, and make the 
pursuit thereof an effort for all the noble qualities of a 
man. I know some such men, — not very numerous any- 
where, — men who show that the common business of life 
is the place to mature great virtues in ; that the pursuit 
of wealth, successful or not, need hinder the growth of 



9 

no excellence, but may promote all manly life. Sucli mea 
stand here as Violets among the Cabbages, making a 
fragrance and a loveliness all their own ; attractive any- 
where, but marvellous in such a neighbourhood as that. 

Look next on the morals of Boston, as indicated by 
THE Newspapers — the daily and the weekly Press. 
Take the whole Newspaper Literature of Boston, cheap 
and costly, good and bad, study it all as a whole, and by 
the inductive method construct the Ethics of the Press, 
and here you find no signs of a higher morality in general 
than you found in Trade. It is the same centre about - 
which all things gravitate here as there. But in the 
newspapers the want of great principles is more obvious, 
and more severely felt than in Trade — the want of Jus- 
tice, of Truth, of Humanity, of a Sympathy with Man. 
In Trade you meet with signs of great power ; the high- 
way of commerce bears marks of giant feet. Our news- 
papers seem chiefly in the hands of little men — whose 
Cunning is in a large ratio to their Wisdom or their Jus- 
tice. You find here little ability, little sound learning, 
little wise political economy — of lofty morals almost noth- 
ing at all. Here, also, the Dollar is both Pope and King ; 
Bight and Truth are vassals, not much esteemed, nor over 
often called to pay service to their Lord, who has other 
soldiers with more pliant neck and knee. It is a signifi- 
cant fact that the commercial newspapers, which of course 
in such a town are the controlling newspapers, in report- 
ing the European news, relate first the state of the mar- 
kets abroad, the price of Cotton, of Consols, and of Corn ; 
then the health of the English queen, and the movements 
of the nations. This is loyal and consistent ; at Rome, 
the journal used to announce first some tidings of the 
Pope, then of the lesser dignitaries of the Church, then 
of the discovery of new antiques, and other matters of 
great pith and moment ; at St. Petersburg, it was first of 
the Emperor that the journal spoke ; at Boston, it is 
legitimate that the health of the Dollar should be reported 
first of all. 

A newspaper is an instrument of great importance : all 



10 

men read it ; many read nothing else ; some it serves as 
TteasDn and Conscience too — in lack of better, why not? 
It speaks to thousands every day on matters of great 
moment — on matters of Morals, of Politics, of Finance. 
It relates daily the occurrences of our land, and of all the 
world. All men are affected by it ; hindered or helped. 
To many a man his morning paper represents more reality 
than his morning prayer. Now there are many in a 
community like this who do not know what to say — I do 
not mean what to think ; thoughtful men know what to 
think — about any thing till somebody tells them ; yet 
they must talk, for " the mouth goes always." To such 
a man a newspaper is invaluable ; as the idolater in the 
Judges had " a Levite to his Priest," so he has a news- 
paper to his Reason or his Conscience, and can talk to 
:he day's end. An able and humane newspaper would 
get this class of persons into good habits of speech, and 
do them a service, inasmuch as good habits of speech are 
better than bad. 

One portion of this literature is degrading ; it seems 
purposely so, as if written by base men, for base readers, 
to serve base ends. I know not which is most depraved 
thereby, the taste or the conscience. Obscene advertise- 
ments are there, meant for the licentious eye ; there are 
loathsome details of vice, of crime, of depravity, related 
with the design to attract, yet so disgusting that any but 
a corrupt man must revolt from them ; there are ac- 
counts of the appearance of culprits in the lower courts, 
of their crime, of their punishment ; these are related 
with an impudent flippancy and a desire to make sport of 
human wretchedness and perhaps depravity, which amaze 
a man of only the average humanity. We read of Judge 
Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes in England, one hundred 
and sixty years ago, but never think there are in the 
midst of us men who, like that monster, can make sport 
Df human misery ; but for a cent you can find proof that 
jhe race of such is not extinct. If a penny-a-liner were 
to go into a military hospital, and make merry at the 
sights he siw there, at the groans he heard, and the keen 
smart his eye witnessed ; could he publish his fiendish 



11 

joy at that spectacle — you would not say he was a man. 
If one mock at the Crimes of men, perhaps at their Sms, 
at the infamous punishments they suffer — what can you 
say of him ? 

The Political Newspapers are a melancholy proof of the 
low morality of this town. You know what they will say 
of any party movement ; that measures and men are 
judged on purely party grounds. The Country is com- 
monly put before mankind, and the Party before the 
country. AVhich of them in political matters pursues a 
course that is fair and just ; how many of them have 
ever advanced a great Idea, or been constantly true to a 
great principle of Natural Justice ; how many resolutely 
oppose a great wrong ; how many can be trusted to expose 
the most notorious blunders of their party ? How many 
of them aim to promote the higher interests of mankind ? 
With what joy does each point out the faults or the follies 
of the hostile party, or watch for its fall ! What servility 
is there in some of these journals — a cringing to the public 
opinion of the party ; a desire that " our efforts may be 
appreciated ! " In our Politics every thing which relates 
to money is pretty carefully looked after, though not al- 
ways well looked after ; but what relates to the moral 
part of Politics is commonly passed over with much less 
heed. You would compliment a Senator who understood 
Finance in all its mysteries, and sneer at one who had 
studied as faithfully the mysteries of War, or of Slaverj'. 
The Mexican War tested the morality of Boston, as it 
appears both in the newspapers and in trade, and showed 
its true value. 

There are som.e few exceptions to this statement : here 
and there is a journal which does set forth the great 
Ideas of this age, and is animated by the Spirit of Hu- 
manity. But such exceptions only remind one of the 
general rule. 

In the Sectarian Journals the same general morality 
appears, but in a worse form. What would have been 
political hatred in the secular prints becomes theological 
odium in the sectarian journals ; not a mere hatred in the 
name of party, but hatred in the name of God and Christ. 



12 

Here is less fairness, less openness, and less ability than 
there, but more malice ; the form, too, is less manly. 
What is there a strut or a swagger is here only a snivel. 
They are the last places in which you need look for the 
spirit of true morality. "Which of the sectarian journals 
of Boston advocates any of the great reforms of the day ; 
na}^, which is not an obstacle in the path of all manly 
reform ? But let us not dwell upon this, only look and 
pass by. 

I am not about to censure the conductors of these 
journals, commercial, pohtical, or theological. I am no 
judge of any man's conscience. No doubt they write as 
they can or must. This literature is as honest and as able 
as " the circumstances will admit of." I look on it as an 
index of our moral condition, for a Newspaper Literature 
always represents the general morals of its readers. Gro- 
cers and butchers purchase only such articles as their 
customers will buy ; the editors of newspapers reveal the 
moral character of their subscribers as well as their corre- 
spondents. The transient hterature of any age is always 
a good index of the moral taste of the age. These two 
witnesses attest the moral condition of the better part of 
the city ; but there are men a good deal lower than the 
general morals of Trade and the Press. Other witnesses 
testify to their moral character. 

Let me now speak of our moral condition as indicated 
by the Poverty in this City. I have so recently spoken 
on the subject of Poverty in Boston, and printed the ser- 
mon, that I will not now mention the misery it brings. I 
will only speak of the moral condition which it indicates, 
and the moral effect it has upon us. 

In this age. Poverty tends to barbarize men ; it shuts 
them out from the educational influences of our times. 
The sons of the miserable class cannot obtain the intel- 
lectual, moral, and religious education which is the birth- 
right of the Comfortable and the Rich. There is a great 
gulf between them and the culture of our times. How 
hard it must be to climb up from a cellar in Cove Place 
to Wisdom, to Honesty, to Piety. I know how comforta- 



13 

blj Pharisaic self-righfceousness can saj, " I thank Thee I 
am not wicked like one of these," and God knows which 
is the best before His eyes, the scorncr, or the man ho 
loathes and leaves to dirt and destruction. I know this 
Poverty belongs to the state of transition we are now in, 
and can only be ended by our passing through this into a 
better ; I see the medicinal effect of Poverty, — that with 
cantharidian sting it drives some men to work, to frugality 
and thrift ; that the Irish has driven the American beg- 
gar out of the streets, and will shame him out of the 
almshouse ere long. But there are men who have not 
force enough to obey this stimulus ; they only cringe and 
smart under its sting. Such men are made Barbarians by 
Poverty — barbarians in Body, in Mind and Conscience, 
in Heart and Soul. There is a great amount of this bar- 
barism in Boston ; it lowers the moral character of the 
place, as icebergs in your harbour next June would chill 
the air all day. 

The fact that such Poverty is here, that so little is 
done by public authority, or by the ablest men in the 
land, to remove the evil tree and dig up its evil root ; that 
amid all the wealth of Boston and all its charity, there 
are not even comfortable tenements for the poor to be 
had at any but a ruinous rent — that is a sad fact, and 
bears a sad testimony to our moral state ! Sometimes 
the spectacle of misery does good, quickening the moral 
sense and touching the electric tie which binds all hu- 
man hearts into one great family ; but when it does not 
lead to this result, then it debases the looker on. To 
know of want, of misery, of all the complicated and far 
extended ill they bring ; to hear of this and to see it in 
the streets ; to have the money to alleviate, and yet not 
to alleviate, the wisdom to devise a cure therefor, and 
yet make no efforts towards it — that is yourself to be 
debased and barbarized. I have often thought, in see- 
ing the Poverty of London, that the daily spectacle of 
such misery did more in a year to debauch the British 
heart than all the slaughter at Waterloo. I know that 
misery has called out Heroic Virtue in some men and 
women, and made Philanthropists of such as otherwise 
2 



14 

had been only getters and keepers of gain, — we liavt 
noble examples of that m the midst of us ; but how manj 
men has Poverty trod down into the mire ; how many- 
has this sight of misery hardened into cold worldliness 
— the man frozen into mere respectabihty, its thin smile 
on his lips, its ungodly contempt in his heart ! 

Out of this Barbarism of Poverty there come two oth- 
er Forms of Evil which indicate the moral condition of 
Boston ; of that portion named just now as below the 
morals of Trade and the Press. These also I will call up 
to testify. 

One is Intemperance. This is a crime against the 
body ; it is felony against your own frame. It makes 
a schism amongst your own members. The amount of it 
is fearfully great in this town. Some of our most wealthy 
citizens, who rent their buildings for the unlawful sale of 
Rum, to be applied to an intemperate abuse, are directly 
concerned in promoting this intemperance; others, rich 
but less wealthy, have sucked their abundance out of the 
bones of the poor, and are actual manufacturers of the 
drunkard and the criminal. Here are numerous Distil- 
leries owned, and some of them conducted, I am told, 
by men of wealth. The fire thereof is not quenched at 
all by day, and there is no night there ; the worm dieth 
not. There out of the sweetest plant which God has 
made to grow under a tropic sun, men distil a poison the 
most baneful to mankind which the world has ever known. 
The poison of the Borgias was celebrated once ; cold 
hearted courtiers shivered at its name. It never killed 
many ; those with merciful swiftness, The poison of Rum 
is yet worse ; it yearly murders thousands ; kills them by 
inches, body and soul. Here are respectable and wealthy 
men, men who this day sit down in a Christian church 
and thank God for his goodness, with contrite hearts 
praise him for that Son of Man who gave his life for man- 
kind, and would gladly give it to mankind ; yet these 
men have ships on the sea to bring the poor man's poison 
here, or bear it hence to other men as poor ; have distil- 
leries on the land to make yet more for the ruin of their 



15 

fellow Christians ; have warehouses full of this plague, 
-which " outvenoms all the worms of Nile ; " have shops 
which they rent for the illegal and murderous sale of 
this terrible scourge. Do they not know the ruin \Yhich 
they work ; are they the only men in the land who 
have not heard of the effects of Intemperance ? I judge 
them not — great God. I only judge myself. I wish 
I could say " they know not what they do ; " but at this 
day who does not know the effect of Intemperance in 
Boston ? 

I speak not of the sale of ardent spirits to be used in 
the arts, to be used for medicine, but of the needless use 
thereof; of its use to damage the body and injure the 
soul of man. The Chief of your Pohce informs me there 
are twelve hundred places in Boston where this article is 
sold to be drunk on the spot ; illegally sold. The Char- 
itable Association of Mechanics in this city have taken 
the accumulated savings of more than fifty years, and 
therewith built a costly establishment where intoxicating 
drink is needlessly but abundantly sold ! Low as the 
moral standard of Boston is, low as are the morals of the 
Press and Trade, I had hoped better things of these men, 
who live in the midst of hard working men, and see the 
miseries of Intemperance all about them. But the dollar 
was too powerful for their Temperance. 

Here are splendid houses, where the rich man or the 
thrifty needlessly drinks. Let me leave them : the Evil 
Demon of Intemperance appears not there ; it is there, 
but under well made garments, amongst educated men, 
who are respected and still respect themselves : amid mer- 
riment and song the Demon appears not. He is there, 
gaunt, bony, and destructive, but so elegantly clad, with 
manners so unoffending, you do not mark his face, nor 
fear his steps. But go down to that miserable lane, 
where men mothered by Misery and sired by Crime — 
where the Sons of Poverty and the Daughters of Wretch- 
edness, are huddled thick together, and you see this De- 
mon of Intemperance in all its ugUness. Let me speak 
soberly : exaggeration is a figure of speech I would al- 
ways banish from my rhetoric, here, above all, where the 



16 

fact is more appalling than any fancy I could invent. In 
the low parts of Boston, where want abounds, where mise- 
.ry abounds, Intemperance abounds yet more, to multiply 
want, to aggravate misery, to make savage w^hat Poverty 
has only made barbarian ; to stimulate passion into Crime. 
Here it is not music and the song which crown the bowl ; it 
is crowned by obscenity, by oaths, by curses, by violence, 
— sometimes by murder. These twine the Ivy round the 
poor man's bowl; — no, 'tis the Upas that they twine. 
Think of the sufferings of the drunkard himself, of his 
poverty, his hunger and his nakedness, his cold ; think 
of his battered body ; of his mind and conscience ■ — how 
they are gone. But is that all ? far from it. These 
curses shall become blows upon his wife ; that savage vio- 
lence shall be expended on his child. In his senses this 
man was a barbarian ; there are centuries of civilization 
betwixt him and cultivated men. But the man of wealth, 
adorned with respectabihty and armed with science, har- 
bors a Demon in the street, a profitable demon to the rich 
man who rents his houses for such a use ; the demon en- 
ters our barbarian, who straightway becomes a savage. 
In his fury he tears his wife and child. The Law, heed- 
less of the greater culprits, the Demon and the Demon- 
breeder, seizes our savage man and shuts him in the jail. 
Now he is out of his tempter's reach ; let us leave him ; 
let us go to his home. His wife and children still are 
there, freed from their old tormentor. Enter ; look upon 
the squalor, the filth, the want, the misery still left be- 
hind. Respectability halts at the door with folded arms, 
and can no further go. But Charity, the Love of Man 
which never fails, enters even there ; enters to lift up the 
fallen, to cheer the despairing, to comfort and to bless. 
Let us leave her there, loving the unlovely, and turn to 
other sights. 

In the streets there are about nine hundred needy 
boys, and about two hundred needy girls, the sons and 
daughters mainly of the intemperate ; too idle or too 
thriftless to work ; too low and naked for the public school. 
They roam about, the nomadic tribes of this town, the 
gipsies of Boston, doing some chance work for a moment, 



17 

committing some petty theft. The temptations of a great 
city are before them.* Soon they will be impressed 
into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in your 
jails, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate 
of the Sons of Intemperance ; but the Daughters ! their 
fate, — let me not tell of that. 

In your Legislature they have just been discussing a 
law against dogs, for now and then a man is bitten and 
dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there are ten mad dogs 
in the state at this moment, and it may be that one man 
in a year dies from the bite of such ! Do the legislators 
know how many shops there are in this town, in this 
state, which all the day and all the year sell to intem- 
perate men a poison that maddens with a hydrophobia 
still w^orse ? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the 
land, if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the 
importation or the production of mad dogs, and if they 
bit and maddened and slew ten thousand men in a yeai*, 
do you believe your Legislature would discuss that evil 
with such fearless speech ? Then you are very young, 
and know little of the tyranny of public opinion, and the 
power of money to silence speech, v/hile Justice still 
comes in, with feet of wool but iron hands. f 



* While this sermon is passing through the press, I have learned of a 
new measure tending to corrupt and brutalize this unfortunate class. I 
refer to the bounty offered by the city government to such as kill dogs. 
This was an ingenious mode of training these poor vagrants to ferocity. 
If the dogs were to be slain, there were men enough to do it speedily and 
effectually ; but to offer half a dollar to any one who would bring in a 
dead dog, was to set a bounty on violence, and to teach these children 
to become savages. I am told that between two and three hundred 
innocent dogs were thus destroyed ; many of them brutally mangled 
and left half dead for hours. Humane men in London have often spok- 
en of the demoralizing influence of the great cattle market at Smithfield, 
and of the slaughter-houses in that city ; that is an evil of long standing, 
not easily redressed, and perhaps unavoidable in a city so large. But 
this slow murder of dogs by vagrant boys in the streets of Boston, was 
needless and wanton as it was cruel and disgusting. However, it is also 
a sign of the times. 

t The statistics of Intemperance are instructive and surprising. Of 
the 1,200 houses in Boston where intoxicating drink is retailed to be 
drunken on the premises, suppose that 200 are too insignificant to be 
noticed, or else are large hotels to be considered presently •, then there are 
1,000 common retail groggeries. Suppose they are in operation 313 days 

2* 



18 

There is yet anotlier witness to the moral condition of 
Boston. I mean Crime. Where there is such Poverty 
and Intemperance, Crime may be expected to follow. I 
will not now dwell upon this theme ; only let me say, that 
in 1848, 3,435 grown persons, and 671 minors were law- 
fully sentenced to your Jail and House of Correction ; in 
all 4,106 ; 3,444 persons were arrested by the night po- 
lice, and 11,178 were taken into custody by the Avatch ; 
at one time there were 144 in the common jail. I have 
already mentioned that more than a thousand boys and 
girls, between six and sixteen, wander as vagrants about 
jour streets; 238 of these are children of widows, 54 have 
neither parent living. It is a fact known to your police, 
that about 1,200 shops are unlawfully open for retailing 
the means of intemperance. These are most thickly 
strown in the haunts of poverty. On a single Sunday 
the pohce found 313 shops in the full experiment of un- 
blushing and successful crime. These rum-shops are the 
Factories of Crime ; the raw material is furnished by Pov- 
erty ; it passes into the hands of the Rumseller, and is 
soon ready for delivery at the mouth of the Jail, or the 
foot of the Gallows. It is notorious that Intemperance is 
the proximate cause of three fourths of the crime in Bos- 
ton ; yet it is very respectable to own houses and rent 
them for the purpose of making men intemperate ; no- 

in the year, 12 hours each day; that they sell one glass in a little less 
than ten minutes, or 100 glasses in the day, and that 5 cents is the price 
•of a glass. Then each groggery receives'$5 a day, or $1,5G5 (313 X 5) 
in a year, and the 1,000 groggeries receive $1,565,000. Let me suppose 
■that each sells drink for really useful purposes to the amount of $05 per 
annum, or all to the amount of $05,000 ; there still remains the sum of 
$1,500,000 spent for intemperance in these 1.000 groggeries. This is 
about twice the sum raised by taxation for the public education of all the 
children in the State of Massachusetts ! But this calculation does not 
equal the cost of Intemperance in these places ; the receipts of these retail 
houses cannot be less than $2,000 per annum, or in the aggregate, $2,000,- 
000. This sum in two years would pay for the new Aqueduct. Sup- 
pose the amount paid for the needless, nay. for the injurious use of in- 
toxicating drink in private families, in boarding houses and hotels, is 
equal to the smallest sum above named ($1,500,000), then it appears 
that the city of Boston spends ($1,500 000 4- $1,500,000 =) $3,000,000 
in a year for an article that does no good to any and harm to all, and 
brings ruin on thousands each year. But if a schoolhouse or a school 
costs a little money, a complaint is soon made. 



19 

body loses his standing by tliat. I am not surprised to 
hear of women armed with knives, and boys with six- 
barrelled revolvers in their pockets ; not surprised at the 
increase of capital trials. 

One other matter let me name — I call it the Crime 
AGAINST Woman. Let us see the evil in its Type — its 
most significant form. Look at that thing of corruption 
and of shame, almost without shame, whom the Judge 
with brief words despatches to the jail. That was a 
Woman once. No ? at least, she was once a Girl. She 
had a mother ; perhaps, beyond the hills, a mother in her 
evening prayer remembers this one child more tenderly 
than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy 
beneath her roof; remembers with a*prayer her child whom 
the world curses after it has made corrupt ! Perhaps she 
had no sucii mother, but was born in the filth of some 
reeking cellar, and turned into the mire of the streets, in 
her undefended innocence, to mingle with the coarseness, 
the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. 
In either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime 
which is so terribly avenged on woman — think you that 
God will hold ]Men innocent of that ! But on this sign of 
our moral state I will not long delay. 

Put all these things together — the character of Trade, 
of the Press ; take the evidence of Poverty, Intemper- 
ance, and Crime — it all reveals a sad state of things. I 
call your attention to these facts. We are all affected by 
them more or less ; all more or less accountable for them. 



II. Hitherto I have only stated facts without making 
comparisons. Let me now compare t^^ -5 present condi- 
tion OF Boston w^ith that in ' ^r times. Every 
man has an Ideal which i^ b"" j the actual facts 
about him. Some men r .^ •*- Ideal in times 
past, and maintain it t: fact ; they are 
commonly men wh'^ ) ' ~ -^nst and 
less Hope for t^ r^"^ ' 



20 

old precedents, little for Justice, Truth, Humanity ; little 
Confidence in Mankind, and a great deal of Fear of new 
things. Such men love to look back and do homage to 
the Past, but it is only a Past of Fancy, not of Fact, they 
do homage to. They tell us we have fallen ; that the 
golden age is behind us, and the garden of Eden ; ours 
are degenerate days ; the men are inferior, the women 
less winning, less witty, and less wise, and the children — 
are an untoward generation, a disgrace not so much to 
their fathers, but certainly to their grandsires. Sometimes 
this is the complaint of men who have grown old ; some- 
times of such as seem to be old without growing so, who 
seem born to the gift of age without the grace of youth. 

Other men have a similar Ideal, commonly a higher 
one, but they place it in the future, not as an historical 
reality, which has been and is therefore to be worshipped, 
but one which is to be by dint of thought, of work. I 
have known old persons who stoutly maintained that the 
pears and the plums and the peaches were not half so 
luscious as they Avere many years ago ; so they bewailed 
the existing race of fruits, complaining of " the general 
decay " of sweetness, and brought over to their way of 
speech some aged juveniles ; meanwhile men born young 
set themselves to productive work, and instead of bewail- 
ing an old fancy, realized a new ideal in new fruits, big- 
ger, fairer, and better than the old. It is to men of this 
latter stamp that we must look for criticism and for coun- 
sel. The others can afford us — a warning, if not by 
their speech, at least by their example. 

Now it is very plain that the people of Ncav England 
are advancing in wealth, in intelligence, and in morality ; 
but in this general march there arc little apparent pauses, 
slight waverings from side to side ; some virtues seem to 
straggle from the -^troop, some to lag behind, for it is not 
always the same y] 4ue that leads the van. 'T is with the 
flock of virtues as^^h wild fowl — the leaders alternate. 
It is probable t^ J' c^Qorals of New England in general, 
and of Boston p*^ ^.did decline somewhat from 1775 

to 1790 • " , "^ -^-^uliar but well known causes 
Avhi*^ \ ' ^rk that result. In the pre- 



21 

vious fifteen years it seems probable that there had been 
a rapid increase of moralUy, through the agency of causes 
equally peculiar. To estimate the moral growth or decline 
of this town, we must not take either period as a stand- 
ard. But take the history of Boston from 1650 to 1700, 
from 1700 to 1750, thence to 1800, and you will see a 
gradual but a decided progress in morality in each of 
these periods. It is not easy to prove this in a short 
sermon ; I can only indicate the points of comparison 
and state the general fact. From 1800 to 1849, this 
progress is well marked, indisputable, and very great. 
Let us look at this a little in detail, pursuing the same 
order of thought as before. 

It is generally conceded that the moral character of 
trade has improved a good deal within fifty or sixty years. 
It was formerly a common saying, that " if a Yankee mer- 
chant were to sell salt water at high tide, he would yet cheat 
in the measure." The saying was founded on the conduct 
of American traders abroad, in the West Indies and else- 
where. Now things have changed for the better. I have 
been told by competent authority, that two of the most 
eminent merchants of Boston fifty or sixty years ago, who 
conducted each a large business and left very large for- 
tunes, were notoriously guilty of such dishonesty in trade 
as would now drive any man from the Exchange. The 
facility with which notes are collected by the banks, com- 
pared to the former method of collection, is itself a proof 
of an increase of practical honesty ; the law for settling 
the affairs of a bankrupt tells the same thing. Now this 
change has not come from any special effort made to pro- 
duce this particular effect, and accordingly it indicates 
the general moral progress of the community. 

The general character of the Press since the end of 
the last century has decidedly improved, as any one may 
convince himself by comparing the newspapers of that 
period with the present ; yet a publicity is nowadays 
given to certain things which were formerly kept more 
closely from the private eye and ear. This circumstance 
sometinies produces an apparent increase of wrong-doing, 
while it is only an increased publicity thereof. Political 



22 

servility and political rancor are certainly bad enough and 
base enough at this day, but not long ago both were baser 
and worse ; to show this, I need only appeal to the memo- 
ries of men before me who can recollect the beginning of 
the present century. Political controversies are conduct- 
ed with less bitterness than before ; honesty is more es- 
teemed ; private worth is more respected. It is not many 
years since the Federal party, composed of men who cer- 
tainly, were an honor to their age, supported Aaron Burr 
for the office of President of the United States ; a man 
whose character, both public and private, was notoriously 
marked with the deepest infamy. PoUtical parties are 
not very puritanical in their virtue at this day ; but I think 
no party would now for a moment accept such a man as 
Mr. Burr for such a post. There is another pleasant 
sign of this improvement in political parties : last au- 
tumn the victorious party in two wards of this city made 
a beautiful demonstration of joy at their success in the 
Presidential election — and on Thanksgiving day and on 
Christmas gave a substantial dinner to each poor person 
in their section of the town. 

Even the theological journals have improved within a 
few years. I know it has been said that some of them 
are not only behind their times, (which is true,) " but 
behind all times. '* It is not so. Compared with the sec- 
tarian writings — tracts, pamphlets, and hard-bound vol- 
umes of an earlier day, they are humane, enlightened, 
and even liberal. 

In respect to Poverty there has been a great change 
for the better. However, it may be said in general that 
a good deal of the Poverty, Intemperance, and Crime is 
of foreign origin ; we are to deal with it, to be blamed 
if we allow it to continue ; not at all to be blamed for its 
origin. I know it is often said, " the poor are getting 
poorer, and soon will become the mere vassals of the rich ; " 
that " the past is full of discouragement ; the future full 
of fear." I cannot think so. I feel neither the discour- 
agement nor the fear. It should be remembered that 
many of the Fathers of New England owned the bodies 
of their laborers and domestics ! The condition of the 



23 

working man has improved relatively to the wealth of the 
land ever since. The wages of any kind of labor at this 
day bear a higher proportion to the things needed for 
comfort and convenience than ever before for two hundred 
years. 

If you go back one hundred years, I think you will jBnd, 
that in proportion to the population and wealth of this 
town or this State, there was considerably more suffering 
from Poverty then than now. I have not, however, be- 
fore me the means of absolute proof of this statement; 
but this is plain, that now Public Charity is more extend- 
ed, more complete, works in a wiser mode, and with far 
more beneficial effect ; that Private Charity has also in- 
creased in extent and in wisdom ; and that pains are now 
taken to uproot the Causes of Poverty, pains which our 
fathers never thought of. In proof of this increase of 
charity, and even of the existence of justice, I need only 
refer to the numerous benevolent societies of modern 
origin, and to the establishment of the ministry at large 
in this city, — the latter the work of Unitarian philan- 
thropy. Some other churches have done a little in this 
good work. But none have done much. I am told the 
Catholic clergy of this city do little to remove the great 
mass of Poverty, Intemperance, and Crime among their 
followers. I know there are some honorable exceptions, 
and how easy it is for Protestant hostility to exaggerate 
matters ; still, I fear the reproach is but too well founded, 
that the Catholic clergy are not vigilant shepherds, who 
guard their sacred fold against the terrible wolves which 
prowl about the flock. I wish to find myself mistaken 
here. 

Some of you remember the " Old Almshouse" in Park 
street ; the condition and character of its inmates ; the 
effect of the treatment they there received. I do not 
say that our present attention to the subject of Poverty 
is any thing to boast of — certainly we have done little in 
comparison with what common-sense demands ; very little 
in comparison with what Christianity enjoins ; still it is 
something; in comparison with "the good old times," it is 
much that we are doing. 



24 

There lias been a great change for the better in the mat- 
ter of Intemperance in drinking. Within thirty ^^ears the 
progress towards sobriety is surprising, and so well marked 
and obvious that to name it is enough. Probably there 
is not a " respectable " man in Boston who would not be 
ashamed to have been seen drunk yesterday ; even to 
have been drunk in never so private a manner ; not one 
who would willingly get a friend or a guest in that condi- 
tion to-day ! Go back a few years, and it brought no pub- 
lic reproach, and I fear no priv^ate shame. A few years 
further back, it was not a rare thing on great occasions 
for the fathers of the town to reel and stagger from their 
intemperance ; the magistrates of the land voluntarily 
furnishing the warning which a romantic historian says 
the Spartans forced upon their slaves. 

It is easy to praise the Fathers of New England ; easier 
to praise them for virtues they did not possess, than to 
discriminate, and fairly judge those remarkable men. I 
admire and venerate their characters, but they were rath- 
er hard drinkers ; certainly a love of cold water was not 
one of their loves. Let me mention a fact or two : it is 
recorded in the Probate office, that in 16T8, at the funeral 
of Mrs. Mary Norton, wddow of the celebrated John Nor- 
ton, one of the ministers of the first church in Boston, 
fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were 
consumed by the " mourners ; " in 1685, at the funeral 
of the Rev. Thomas Cobbett, minister at Ipswich, there 
were consumed one barrel of wine and two barrels of ci- 
der, — " and as it was cold," there was " some spice and 
ginger for the cider." You may easily judge of the 
drunkenness and riot on occasions less solemn than the 
funeral of an old and beloved minister. Towns provided 
intoxicating drink at the funeral of their paupers ; in Sa- 
lem, in 1728, at the funeral of a pauper, a gallon of wine 
and another of cider are charged as " incidental ; " the 
next year six gallons of rum on a similar occasion ; in Lynn, 
in 1711, the town furnished "half a barrel of cider for 
the Widow Dispaw's funeral." Affairs had come to such 
a pass, that in 1742 the General Court forbade the use of 
wine and rum at funerals. In 1673, Increase Mather 



25 

published liis " Wo unto Drunkards." Governor Win- 
throp complains, in 1680, that " the young folk gave them- 
selves to drink hot waters very immoderately." * 

But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years 
of age does not remember the aspect of Boston on public 
days; on the evening of such days ? Compare the " Elec- 
tion day," or the Fourth of July, as they were kept thirty 
or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of 
you remember the celebration of Peace, in 1783 ; many 
of you can recollect the similar celebration in 1815. On 
each of those days the inhabitants from the country towns 
came here to rejoice with the citizens of this town. Com- 
pare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with 
the order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the 



* In 1679, " the Reforming Synod," assembled at Boston, amongst oth- 
er sins of the times, thus compUiined of Intemperance : " That Heathen- 
ish and Idohatrous practice of Health-drinking is too frequent. That 
Shameful Iniquity of Sinful Drinking is become too general a Provoca- 
tion. Days of Training, and other publick Solemnities have been abused 
in this respect : And not only English but Indians have been debauched 
by those that call themselves Christians. . . . This is a crying Sin 
and the more aggravated in that the first Planters of this Colony did 
. . . come into this Land with a Design to convert the Heathen unto 
Christ, but if instead of that they be taught Wickedness ... the 
Lord may Avell punish by them. . . . There are more Temptations 
and Occasions unto that Sin publickly alloAved of, than any Necessity 
doth require. The proper end of Taverns ^c. being tor the Entertainment 
of Strangers ... a fiir less number would suffice," &c. 

Cotton Mather saj^s of Intemperance in his time : " To see . . . 
a drunken man become a Broivncd man, is to see but a most Retaliating 
Hand of God. Why we have seen this very Thing more than Threescore 
times in our Land. And I remember the drowning of one Drunkard, so 
odiy circumstanced ; It was in the Hold of a Vessel that lay full of Wa- 
ter near the Shore. We have seen it so often, that I am amazed at you, 
O ye Drunkards of New England; I am amazed that you can harden your 
Hearts in your Sin, without expecting to be destroyed suddenly and without 
Remedy. Yea and we have seen the Devil that has possessed the Drunk- 
ard, throwing him into Fire, and then kept shrieking Fire! Fire! till 
they have gone down to the Fire that never shall be quenched. _Yea, 
more than one or two Drunken women in this A'cry Town, have while in 
their Drink, fallen into the Fire, and so they have Tragically gone roaring 
out of one Fire into another. ye Daughters of Belial, Hear and Fear 
and do wickedly no more." 

The history of the first barrel of Rum whicJi was brought to Plymouth 
has been carefully traced out to a considerable extent. More than thirty 
of the " Pilgrims " or their descendants were publicly punished for the 
drunkenness it occasioned. 

3 



26 

Introduction of Water last autumn — and you see what 
Las been done in sixty or seventy years for Temperance. 

A great deal of the Crime of Boston is of foreign ori- 
gin : of the 1,0G6 children vagrant in your streets, only 
103 had American parents ; of the 933 persons in the 
House of Correction here, 616 were natives of other 
countries ; I know not how many were the children of 
Irishmen, who had not enjoyed the advantages of our 
institutions. I cannot tell how many rum-shops are kept 
by foreigners. Now in Ireland no pains Imve been taken 
with the education of the people by the Government ; very 
little by the Catholic church ; indeed, the British govern- 
ment for a long time rendered it impossible for the Church 
to do any thing in this w^ay. For more than seventy 
years, in that Catholic country, none but a Protestant 
could keep a school or even be a tutor in a private family. 
A Catholic schoolmaster was to be transported, and if he 
returned, adjudged guilty of high treason, barbarously 
put to death, drawn, and quartered. Now a Protestant 
schoolmaster to a Catholic is as repulsive as a Mahometan 
schoolmaster or an Atheist would be to you. It is not 
surprising, therefore, that the Irish are ignorant, and, as a 
consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, 
and barbarian ; not to be wondered at if they conduct like 
wild beasts when they are set loose in a land where we 
think the individual must be left free to the greatest 
extent. Of course they will violate our laws — those wild 
Bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the 
civihzed domestic cattle ; will commit the great crimes of 
violence, even capital offences, which certainly have in- 
creased rapidly of late. This increase of foreigners is 
prodigious : more than hal^ the children in your public 
schools are children of foreigners ; there are more Catho- 
lic than Protestant children born in Boston. 

With the general and unquestionable advance of moral- 
ity, some offences are regarded as crimes which were not 
noticed a few years ago. Drunkenness is an example 
of this. An Irishman in his native country thinks little 
of beating another or being beaten ; he brings his habits 
of violence with him, and does not at once learn to con- 



27 

form to our laws. Then, too, a good deal of crime which 
was once concealed is now brought to light by the Press, 
by the superior activity of the PoHce ; and yet, after all 
that is said, it seems quite clear that what is legally called 
crime and committed by Americans, has diminished a good 
deal in fifty years : such crime, I think, never bore so small 
a proportion to the population, wealth, and activity of Bos- 
ton, as now. Even if we take all the offences committed 
by these strangers who have come amongst us, it does 
not compare so very unfavorably as some allege with the 
'' good old times." I know men often look on the Fathers 
of this Colony as saints ; but in 1635, at a time when the 
whole state contained less than one tenth of the present 
population of Boston, and they were scattered from Wey- 
mouth Fore-River to the Merrimack, the first grand jury 
ever empanelled at Boston "found" a hundred bills of 
indictment at their first coming together. 

If you consider the circumstances of the class who 
commit the greater part of the crimes which get punished, 
you will not wonder at the amount ; the criminal court is 
their school of morals ; the constable and judge are their 
teachers ; but under this rude tuition I am told that the 
Irish improve and actually become better. The children 
who receive the instruction of our public schools, imper- 
fect as they are, will be far better than their fathers ; and 
their grandchildren will have lost all trace of their barba- 
rian descent. 

I have often spoken of our Penal Law as wrong in its 
Principle, taking it for granted that the ignorant and mis- 
erable men who commit crime do it always from wicked- 
ness, and not from the pressure of circumstances wliich 
have brutahzed the man ; wrong in its Aim, which is to 
take vengeance on the offender, and not to do him a good 
in return for the evil he has done ; wrong in its Method, 
which is to inflict a punishment that is wholly arbitrary, 
and then to send the punished man, overwhelmed with 
new disgrace, back to society, often made worse than be- 
fore, — not to keep him till we can correct, cure, and send 
him back a reformed man. I would retract nothing of 
what I have often said of that: but not long ago all this 



28 

was worse ; the particular statutes were often terribly un- 
just ; the forms of trial afforded the accused but little 
chance of justice ; the punishments were barbarous and 
terrible. The Plebeian tyranny of the Lord Brethren 
in New England was not much lighter than the Patrician 
despotism of the Lord Bishops in the old world, and was 
more insulting. Let me mention a few facts, to refresh 
the memories of those who think we are going to ruin, and 
can only save ourselves by holding to the customs of our 
Fathers and of the " good old times." Li 1631 , a man 
was fined forty pounds, whipped on the naked 'back, both 
his ears cut off, and then banished this colony, for uttering 
hard speeches against the government and the church at 
Salem. In the first century of the existence of this town, 
the magistrates could banish a woman because she did 
not like the preaching, nor all the ministers, and told the 
people why ; they could whip women naked in the streets, 
because they spoke reproachfully of the magistrates ; they 
could fine men twenty pounds and then banish them, for 
comforting a man in jail before his trial ; they could pull 
down, with legal formality, the house of a man they did 
not like ; they could whip women at a cart's tail from 
Salem to Rhode Island, for fidehty to their conscience ; 
they could beat, imprison, and banish men out of the 
land, simply for baptizing one another in a stream of wa- 
ter, instead of sprinkling them from a dish ; they could 
crop the ears, and scourge the backs, and bore the 
tongues of men, for being Quakers ; yes, they could shut 
them in jails, could banish them out of the colony, could 
sell them as slaves, could hang them on a gallows — sole- 
ly for worshipping God after their own conscience ; they 
could convulse the whole land, and hang some thirty or 
forty men for witchcraft, and do all this in the name of 
God, and then sing Psalms with most nasal twang, and 
pray by the hour, and preach — I will not say how long, 
nor what, nor how ! It is not yet one hundred years 
since two slaves were judicially burnt alive on Boston 
neck, for poisoning their master. 

But why talk of days so old ? Some of you remem- 
ber when the pillory and the whipping-post were a part of 



29 

the public furniture of the law, and occupied a prominent 
place in the busiest street in town. Some of you have 
seen men and women scourged, naked, and bleeding, in 
State street ; have seen men judicially branded in the 
forehead with a hot iron, their ears clipped off by the 
sheriff, and held up to teach humanity to the gaping 
crowd of idle boys and vulgar men. A magistrate was 
once brought into odium in Boston for humanely giving 
back to his victim a part of the ear he had officially shorn 
off, that the mutilated member might be restored and made 
whole. How long is it since men sent their servants to 
the '' Workhouse," to be beaten " for disobedience," at 
the discretion of the master ? It is not long since the 
gallows was a public spectacle here in the midst of us, 
and a hanging made a holiday for the rabble of this city 
and the neighbouring towns ; even women came to see the 
death-struggle of a fellow-creature, and forming the larger 
part of the mob ; many of you remember the procession 
of the condemned man sitting on his coffin — a procession 
from the jail to the gallows — from one end of the city to 
the other. I remember a public execution some fourteen 
or fifteen years ago — and some of the students of theol- 
ogy at Cambridge, of undoubted soundness in the Unita- 
rian faith, came here to see men kill a fellow-man ! 

Who can think of these things, and not see that a 
great progress has been made in no long time. But if 
these things be not proof enough, then consider what has 
been done here in this century for the reformation of Ju- 
venile Offenders ; for the Discharged Convict ; for the 
Blind, the Deaf and Dumb ; for the Insane, and now 
even for the Idiot ; think of the numerous societies for 
the Widows and Orphans ; for the Seamen ; the Tem- 
perance Societies ; the Peace Societies ; the Prison Disci- 
pline Society ; the mighty movement against Slavery, 
which, beginning with a few heroic men who took the 
roaring Lion of Pubhc Opinion by the beard — fearless 
of his roar — has gone on now, till neither the hardest 
nor the softest courage in the state dares openly defend 
the unholy institution. A philanthropic female physician 
delivers gratuitous lectures on Physiology to the poor of 
3* 



80 

this city, to enable them to take better care of their 
houses and their bodies ; an unpretending man, for years 
past, responsible to none but God, has devoted all his 
time and his toil to the most despised class of men, and 
has saved hundreds from the jail, from crime and ruin at 
the last ; here are many men and women not known to 
the public, but known to the Poor, — who are daily min- 
istering to the Avants of the body and the mind. Con- 
sider all these things, and who can doubt that a great 
moral progress has been made. It is not many years 
since we had white slaves, and a Scotch boy was invoiced 
at fourteen pounds lawful money, in the inventory of an 
estate in Boston. In 1630, Governor Dudley complains 
that some of the founders of New England, in conse- 
quence of a famine, were obliged to set free one hundred 
and eighty servants, " to our extreme loss," for they had 
cost sixteen or twenty pounds apiece. Seventy years 
since, Negro Slavery prevailed in Massachusetts, and 
men did not blush at the institution. Think of the treat- 
ment which the leaders of the Anti-Slavery Reform met 
with but a few years ago, and you see what a progress 
has been made ! 

I have extenuated nothing of our condition ; I have 
said the morals of Trade are low morals, and the morals 
of the Press are low ; that Poverty is a terrible evil to 
deal with, and we do not deal with it manfully ; that In- 
temperance is a mournful curse, all the more melancholy 
when rich men purposely encourage it ; that here is an 
amount of Crime which makes us shudder to think of; 
that the voice of human blood cries out of the ground 
against us. I disguise nothing of all this ; let us confess 
the fact, and, ugly as it is, look it fairly in the face. Still, 
our moral condition is better than ever before. I know 
there are men who seem born with their eyes behind, 
their Hopes all running into memory ; some who wish they 
had been born long ago : they might as well. Sure 'tis 
no fault of theirs that they were not. I hear what they 
have to tell us. Still, on the whole, the aspect of things 
is most decidedly encouraging: for if so much has been 
done when men understood the matter less than we — 



31 

both cause and cure — how much more can be done for 
the future?* 



What can we do to make things better ? 

I have so recently spoken of Poverty that I shall say 
little now. A great change will doubtless take place be- 
fore long in the relations between Capital and Labor ; a 
great change in the Spirit of Society. I do not believe 
the disparity now existing between the wealth of men has 
its origin in Human Nature, and therefore is to last for 
ever ; I do not believe it is just and right that less than 
one twentieth of the people in the nation should own more 
than ten twentieths of the property of the nation, unless 
by their own head, or hands, or heart, they do actually 
create and earn that amount. I am not now blaming any 
class of men — only stating a fact. There is a profound 
conviction in the hearts of many good men, rich as well 
as poor, that things are wrong ; that there is an ideal right 
for the actual wrong ; but I think no man yet has risen up 
with ability to point out for us the remedy of these evils, 
and deliver us from what has not badly been named the 
" Feudalism of Capital." Still, without waiting for the 
great man to arise, we can do something with our little- 
ness even now ; the truant children may be snatched 
from vagrancy, beggary, and ruin ; tenements can be 
built for the poor, and rented at a reasonable rate. It 
seems to me that something more can be done in the way 
of providing employment for the poor, or helping them to 
employment. 

In regard to Intemperance, I will not say we can end 
it by direct efforts. So long as there is Misery there will 
be a new provocation to that vice, if the means thereof 
are within reach. I do not believe there will be much 
more intemperance amongst well-bred men ; among the 

* In one thing there latterly has been an obvious decline : in Cleanli- 
ness. Forty years ago, no doubt, the city was dirtier, but in twenty years 
there has been a great accumulation of dirt. Boston may now I'ank with 
Cologne, as one of the foulest of cities ; yet Wesley said, and with truth, 
that " cleanliness is nigh unto godliness ! " 



32 

poor and wretched it will doubtless long continue. But 
if we cannot end, we can diminish it, fast as we will. If 
rich men did not manufacture, nor import, nor sell ; if 
they would not rent their buildings for the sale of intoxi- 
cating liquor for improper uses ; if they did not by their 
example favor the improper use thereof; how long do you 
think your Police would arrest and punish one thousand 
drunkards in the year ? how long would twelve hundred 
Rum-shops disgrace your town ? Boston is far more so- 
ber, at least in appearance, than other large cities of 
America, but it is still the head quarters of Intemperance 
for the State of Massachusetts. In arresting Intem- 
perance, two thirds of the Poverty, three fourths of the 
Crime of this city would end at once ; and an amount of 
Misery and Sin which I have not the skill to calculate. 
Do you say we cannot diminish Intemperance — neither 
by Law, nor by righteous efforts without Law ? Oh, fie 
upon such talk. Come, let us be honest, and say we 
don't wish to, not that we can't. Look here : it is plain 
that in sixteen years we can build seven great Railroads 
radiating out of Boston, three or four hundred miles long ; 
that we can conquer the Connecticut and the Merrimack, 
and all the lesser streams of New England ; can build up 
Lowell, and Chicopee, and Lawrence ; why, in four years 
Massachusetts can invest eight and fifty millions of dol- 
lars in railroads and manufactures — and cannot prevent 
Intemperance ; cannot diminish it in Boston ! So there 
are no able men in this town 1 I am amazed at such 
talk, in such a place, full of such men, surrounded by 
such trophies of their work ! When the churches preach 
and men believe that Mammon is not the only God we 
are practically to serve ; that it is more reputable to keep 
men sober, temperate, comfortable, intelligent, and thriv- 
ing, than it is to make money out of other men's misery ; 
more Christian than to sell and manufacture Rum, to 
rent houses for the making of drunkards and criminals 
— then we shall set about this business with the energy 
that shows we are in earnest, and by a method which 
will do the work. 

In the matter of Crime, something can be done to give 



33 

efficiency to the laws. No doubt a thorough change must 
be made in the Idea of Criminal Legislation ; Vengeance 
must give way to Justice, Police-men become moral mis- 
sionaries, and Jails moral hospitals, that discharge no crim- 
inal until he is cured. It will take long to get the Idea 
into men's minds. You must encounter many a doubt, 
many a sneer, and expect many a failure, too. Men who 
think they '' know the world," because they know that 
most men are selfish, will not believe you. We must wait 
for new facts to convince such men. After the Idea is 
established, it will take long to organize it fittingly. 

Much can be done for juvenile offenders, much for dis- 
charged convicts, even now. We can pull down the gal- 
lows, and with it that loathsome theological Idea on which 
it rests : the Idea of a Vindictive God. A remorseless 
court and careful police can do much to hinder crime ; * 
but they cannot remove the causes thereof. 

Last year a good man, to whom the state was deeply 
indebted before, suggested that a Moral Police should be 
appointed to look after offenders ; to see why they com- 
mitted the crime ; and if only necessity compelled them, 
to seek out for them some employment, and so remove 
the causes of crime in detail. The thought was worthy 
of the age and of the man ; in the hands of a practical 
man this thought might lead to good results. A be- 
ginning has already been made in the right direction in 
the establishment of the State Reform School for boys ; 
it will be easy to improve on this experiment, and conduct 
prisons for men on the same scheme of correction and 
cure, not merely of punishment in the name of vengeance. 
But after all, so long as Poverty, Misery, Intemperance, 
and Ignorance continue, no Civil Police, no Moral Police, 
can keep such causes from creating Crime. What keeps 
you from a course of crime ? Your Morahty ; your 
Religion ? Is it ? Take away your property, your home, 
your friends, the respect of respectable men ; take away 

* In 1847, the amount of goods stolen in Boston and reported to the 
Police, beyond what was received, was more than $37,000; in 1848, less 
than $ 1 1 ,000. In '49 the Police were twice as numerous as in the former 
year, and organized with new and remarkable skill. 



34 

what you have received from education, intellectual, moral, 
and religious, and how much better would the best of us 
be than the men who will to-morrow be huddled off to jail, 
for crimes committed in a dram-shop to-day ? The cir- 
cumstances which have kept you temperate, industrious, 
respectable, would have made nine tenths of the men in 
jail as good men as you are. 

It is not pleasant to think that there are no amusements 
which lie level to the poor, in this country. In Paris, Na- 
ples, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, there are cheap pleasures for 
poor men, which yet are not low pleasures. Here there 
are amusements for the Comfortable and the Rich, not too 
numerous, rather too rare, perhaps, but none for the Poor 
— save only the vice of drunkenness; that is hideously 
cheap ; the inward temptation powerful ; the outward oc- 
casion always at hand. Last summer some benevolent 
men treated the poor children of the city to a day of sun- 
shine, fresh air, and frolic in the fields ; once a year the 
children gathered together by another benevolent man 
have a floral procession in the streets ; some of them have 
charitably been taught to dance. These things are beau- 
tiful to think of; signs of our progress from "the good 
old times," and omens of a brighter day, when Christianity 
shall bear more abundantly flower and fruit even yet more 
fair. 

The morals of the current Literature, of the daily 
Press — you can change when you will. If there is not 
in us a demand for low morals, there will be no supply. 
The morals of Trade and of Politics, the handmaid there- 
of, we can make better soon as we wish. 



It has been my aim to give suggestions rather than 
propose distinct plans of action ; I do not know that I am 
capable of that. But some of you are rich men, some 
able men, many of you, I think, are good men ; I appeal 
to you to do something to raise the moral character of this 
town. All that has been done in fifty years or a hundred 
and fifty seems very little, while so much still remains to 
do ; only a hint and an encouragement. You cannot do 



85 

much, nor I much ; that is true. But after all, every 
thing must begin with individual men and women. ^ You 
can at least give the example of what a good man ought 
to be and to do, to-day ; to-morrow you will yourself be 
the better man for it. So far as that goes, you will have 
done something to mend the morals of Boston. You can 
tell of actual evils, and tell of your remedy for them, 
can keep clear from committing the evils yourself: that 
also is something. 

Here are two things that are certain : We are all 
Brothers, rich and poor, American and foreign, put here 
by the same God, for the same end, and journeying 
towards the same heaven, owing mutual help ; then, too, 
the wise "men and good men are the natural Guardians 
of Society, and God will not hold them guiltless if they 
leave their Brother to perish. I know our moral condition 
is a reproach to us ; I will not deny that, nor try to abate 
the shame and grief we should feel. When I think of the 
Poverty and Misery in the midst of us, and all the conse- 
quences thereof, I hardly dare feel grateful for the prince- 
ly fortunes some men have gathered together. Certainly 
it is not a Christian society where such extremes exist ; 
we are only in the process of conversion ; Proselytes of 
the Gate, and not much more. There are noble men in 
this city, who have been made so by the sight of Wrong 
— of Intemperance, and Poverty, and Crime. Let man- 
kind honor great conquerors who only rout armies, and 
" plant fresh laurels where they kill " ; I honor most the 
men who contend against Misery, against Crime and Sin ; 
men that are the Soldiers of Humanity, and in a low age, 
amidst the mean and sordid spirits of a great trading town, 
lift up their serene foreheads and tell us of the Right, the 
True, first Good, first Perfect, and first Fair. From such 
men I hear the prophecy of the better time to come. In 
their example I see proofs of the final triumph of Good 
over Evil. Angels are they who keep the Tree of Life, 
not with flaming sword repelling men, but with friendly 
hand plucking therefrom and giving unto all the Leaves, 
the Flower, and the Fruit of Life, for the healing of the 
nations. A single good man, kindhng his early flame. 



86 

wakens the neiglibours with his words of cheer ; thej at 
his lamp shall light their torch and household fire, antici- 
pating the beamy warmth of day. Soon it will be morn- 
ing, warm and light ; we shall be up and a-doing, and the 
lighted lamp, which seemed at first too much for eyes to 
bear, will look ridiculous, and cast no shadow in the noon- 
day-sun. A hundred years hence men will stand here as 
I do now, and speak of the evils of our times as things past 
and gone, and wonder that able men could ever be appalled 
by such difficulties, and think them not to be surpassed. 
Still, all depends on the faithfulness of men — your faith- 
fulness and mine. 

The last election has shown us what resolute men can 
do on a trifling occasion, if they will. You know the efforts 
of the three parties — what meetings they held, what mon- 
ey they raised, what talent was employed, what speeches 
made, what ideas set forth : not a town was left unat- 
tempted ; scarce a man who had wit to throw a vote but 
his vote was sohcited. You see the revolution which was 
wrought by that vigorous style of work. When such 
men set about reforming the Evils of Society with such 
a determined soul, what Evil can stand against mankind ? 
We can leave nothing to the next generation worth so 
much as Ideas of Truth, Justice, and Religion, organized 
into fitting Institutions : such we can leave, and if true 
men, such we shall. 



SERMON 



SPIRITUAL CONDITION OP BOSTON, 



PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, FEB. 18, 1849, 



BY THEODORE PARKER, 



MUaSTER OF THE XXVIU. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY CROSBY AND NICHOLS 

111 Washington Street. 

1849. 



SERMON 



"Br THEIR Fruits te shall know thesi." — Matthew, vxii : 20. 

Last Sunday I said something of the moral condition 
of Boston ; to-day I ask your attention to a Sermon of 
THE Spiritual Condition of Boston. I use the word 
Spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition 
of this town in respect to Piety. A little while since, 
in a Sermon of Piety, I tried to show that Love of God 
lay at the foundation of all Manly Excellence, and was the 
condition, sine qua non, of all noble, manly development ; 
that Love of Truth, Love of Justice, Love of Love, were 
respectively the condition of intellectual, moral, and affec- 
tional development, and that they were also respectively 
the intellectual, moral, and affectional forms of Piety ; 
that the Love of God as the Infinite Father, the Totality 
of Truth, Justice, and Love, was the general condition of 
the total development of man's spiritual powers. But I 
showed that sometimes this Piety, intellectual, moral, 
affectional, or total, did not arrive at Self consciousness ; 
the man only unconsciously loving the Infinite, in one or 
all these modes, and in such cases the man was a loser by 
frustrating his Piety and allowing it to stop in the trun- 
cated form of Unconsciousness. 

Now what is in you will appear out of you ; if Piety 
be there in any of these forms, in either mode, it will 
come out ; if not there, its fruits cannot appear. You 
may reason forward or backward ; if you know Piety 
exists, you may foretell its appearance ; if you find fruits 
thereof, you may reason back and be sure of its existence. 



40 

Pietj is Love of God as God, and as we only love -what 
we are like, and in that degree, so it is also a Likeness to 
God. Now it is a general doctrine in Christendom that 
Divinity must manifest itself; and, in assuming the high- 
est form of manifestation known to us. Divinity becomes 
Humanity. However, that doctrine is commonly taught 
in the specific and not generic form, and is enforced by 
an historical and concrete example, but not by way of a 
universal thesis. It appears thus : the Christ was God ; 
as such He must manifest himself; the Form of Mani- 
festation was that of a complete and perfect Man. I 
reject the concrete example, but accept the universal 
doctrine on which the special dogma of the Trinity is 
erected. From that I deduce this as a general rule : if 
you follow the law of your Nature, and are simple and 
true to that, as much of Godhood as there is in you, so 
much of Manhood will come out of you, — and vice versa, 
as much of Manhood comes out of you, so much of God- 
hood was there within you ; as much subjective Divinity, 
so much objective Humanity. 

Such being the case, the demands you can make on a 
man for Manliness must depend for their answer on the 
amount of Piety on deposit in his character ; so it be- 
comes important to know the condition of this town in 
respect of Piety, for if this be not right in the above 
sense, nothing else is right ; or, to speak more clerically, 
" unless the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but 
in vain," and unless Piety be developed or a-developing 
in men, it is vain for the minister to sit up late of a Sat- 
urday night to concoct his sermon, and to rise up early of 
a Sunday morning to preach the same ; he fights but as 
one that beatcth the air, and spends his strength for that 
which is nought. They are in the right, therefore, who 
first of all things demand Piety : so let us see what signs 
or proof we have, and of what amount of Piety in Boston. 

Now, to determine this, we must have some Test by 
which to judge of the Quality, distinguishing Piety from 
Impiety, — and some Standard whereby to measure the 
Quantity thereof ; for though you may know what Piety 
is in you, I what is in me, and God what is in both and 



41 

in all the rest of us, it is plain that we can only judge of 
the existence of Piety in other men, and measure its quan- 
tity, by an outward manifestation thereof, in some form 
"which shall serve at once as a trial-test and a standard- 
measure. 

Now, then, as I mentioned in that former sermon, it is 
on various sides alleged that there arc two outward Mani- 
festations of Piety, a good deal unlike : each is claimed 
by some men as the exclusive trial-test and standard- 
measure. Let me say a word of each. 

I. Some contend for what I call the conventional 
STANDARD ; that is, the manifestation of Piety by means 
of certain prescribed forms. Of these forms there are 
three modes or degrees ; namely, first, the form of Bodily 
Attendance on public worship ; second, the Belief in cer- 
tain Doctrines, not barely because they are proven true, 
or known without proof, but because they are taught with 
authority ; and third, a passive acquiescence in certain 
Forms and Ceremonies, or an active performance thereof. 

II. The other I call the natural standard ; that is, 
the manifestation of Piety in the natural form of Moral- 
ity, in its various Degrees and Modes of Action. 

It is plain that the amount of Piety in a man or a town 
will appear very different when tested by one or the other 
of these standards. It may be that very little water runs 
through the wooden trough which feeds the saw-mill at 
Niagara, and yet a good deal, blue and bounding, may 
leap over the rock adown its natural channel. In a mat- 
ter of this importance, when taking account of- a stock so 
precious as Piety, it is but fair to try it by both standards. 



Let us begin with the Conventional Standard, and ex- 
amine Piety by its manifestation in the ecclesiastical forms. 
Here is a difficulty at the outset, in determining upon the 
standard, for there is no one and general ecclesiastical 
standard, common to all parties of Christians, from the 
Catholic to the Quaker ; each measures by its own stand- 
ard, but denies the correctness of all the others. It is as 



42 

if a Foot were declared the unit of long measure, and 
then the actual foot of the Chief-Justice of a state were 
taken as the rule by which to correct all measurements ; 
then the foot would vary as you went from North Carolina 
to South, and in any one state would vary with the health 
of the Judge. However, to do what can be done with a 
measure thus uncertain, it is plain, that, estimated by any 
ecclesiastical standard, the amount of Piety is small. 
There is, as men often say, " a general decline of Piety " ; 
that is a common complaint, recorded and registered. 
But what makes the matter worse to the ecclesiastical 
philosopher, and more appaUing to the complainers, is this : 
it is a decline of long standing. The disease which is 
thus lamented is said to be acute, but is proved to be 
chronic also ; only it would seem from the lamentations 
of some modern Jeremiahs, that the decline went on with 
accelerated velocity, and the more chronic the disease 
was, the acuter it also became. 

Tried by this standard, things seem discouraging. To 
get a clearer view, let us. look a little beyond our own 
borders at first, and then come nearer home. The Cath- 
olic church complains of a general defection. The major- 
ity of the Christian church confesses that the Protestant 
Reformation was not a Revival of Religion, not a " great 
awakening," but a great falling to sleep, the faith of 
Luther and Calvin was a great decline of Religion — a 
decline of Piety in the Ecclesiastical form ; that modern 
Philosophy, the Physics of Gallileo and Newton, the 
Metaphysics of Descartes and of Kant, mark another de- 
cline of Rehgion — a decline of Piety in the Philosophical 
form ; that all the modern Democracy of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries marks a yet further decline of 
Rehgion — a decline of Piety in the Political form ; that 
all the modern Secular Societies for removing the evils 
of men and their sins, mark a yet fourth decline of Re- 
ligion — a decline of Piety in the Philanthropic form. 
Certainly, when measured by the mediajval standard of 
Catholicism, these mark four great declensions of Piety, 
for in all four the old principle of subordination to an 
external and j ersonal authority is set aside. 



I 



43 

All over Europe this decline is still going on ; ecclesias- 
tical establishments are breaking down ; other establish- 
ments are a-building up. Pius the Ninth seems likely to 
fulfil his own prophecy, and be the last of the Popes ; I 
mean the last mih temporal power. There is a great 
schism in the North of Europe ; the Germans will be 
Catholics, but no longer Roman. The old forms of Piety, 
such as service in Latin, the withholding of the Bible from 
the people, compulsory confession, the ungrateful celibacy 
of a reluctant priesthood — all these are protested against. 
It is of no avail that the holy coat of Jesus at Treves 
works greater miracles than the Apostolical napkins and 
aprons ; of no avail that the Virgin Mary appeared on the 
nineteenth of September, 1846, to two shepherd-children 
at La Salette, in France. What are such things to Ronge 
and Wessenberg ? Neither the miraculous coat nor the 
miraculous mother avails aught against this untoward 
generation, charm they never so wisely. The decline of 
Piety goes on. By the new constitution of France all 
forms of Religion are equal ; the Catholic and the Prot- 
estant, the Mahometan and the Jew, are equally sheltered 
under the broad shield of the Law. Even Spain, the 
fortress walled and moated about, whither the spirit of 
the Middle Ages retired and shut herself up long since, 
womanning her walls with unmanly priests and kings, 
with unfeminine queens and nuns — even Spain fails with 
the general failure. British capitalists buy up her con- 
vents and nunneries, to turn them into woollen mills. 
Monks and nuns forget their beads in some new handi- 
craft ; sister Mary, who sat still in the house, is now also 
busy with serving, careful, indeed, about more things than 
formerly, but not cumbered nor troubled as before. Med- 
itative Rachels, and Hannahs long unblest, who sat^ in 
solitude, have now become like practical Dorcas, making 
garments for the poor ; the Bank is become more impor- 
tant than the Inquisition. The order of St. Francis 
d'Assisi, of St. Benedict, even of St. Dominic himself, is 
giving away before the new order of Arkwright, Watt, 
and Fulton, — the order of the Spinning Jenny and the 
Power Loom. It is no lon2;er works on the Miraculous 



44 

Conception, or Meditations on the Five Wounds of the 
Saviour, or Commentaries on the Song of Songs which is 
Solomon's — that get printed there : but fierj novels of 
Eugene Sue and George Sand ; and so extremes meet. 

Protestant estabhshments share the same peril. A new 
sect of Protestants rises up in Germany, who dissent as 
much from the letter and spirit of Protestantism as the 
Protestants from Catholicism ; men that mW not believe 
the infallibility of the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, 
the Depravity of Man, the Eternity of Future Punish- 
ment, nor Justification by Faith — a justification before 
God for mere belief before man. The new spirit gets 
possession of new men, who cannot be written down, nor 
even howled down. Excommunication or abuse do no 
good on such men as Bauer, Strauss, and Schwegler ; and 
it answers none of their questions. It seems pretty clear, 
that in all the North of Germany, within twenty years, 
there will be entire freedom of worship, for all sects, 
Protestant and Catholic. 

In England Protestantism has done its work less faith- 
fully than in Germany ; the Protestant spirit of England 
came here two hundred years ago, so that new and Prot- 
estant England is on the west of the ocean ; in England 
an Established Church lies there still, an iceberg in the 
national garden. But even there the decline of the ec- 
clesiastical form of Piety is apparent : the new Bishops 
must not sit in the House of Lords till the old ones die 
out, for the number of Lords spiritual must not increase, 
though the temporal may ; the new attempt, at Oxford and 
elsewhere, to restore the Middle Ages, will not prosper. 
Bring back all the old rites and forms into Leeds and 
Manchester ; teach them the theology of Thomas Aquinas 
or of St. Bernard ; bid men adore the uplifted wafer as the 
very God — men who toil all day with iron mills, who ride 
in steam-drawn coaches, and talk by lightning in a whisper 
from the Irk to the Thames, — they will not consent to 
the philosophy or the theology of the Middle Ages, nor 
be satisfied with the old forms of Piety, which, though too 
elevated for their fathers in the time of Elizabeth, are yet 
too low for them, at least too antiquated. Dissenters 



45 

have got into the House of Commons ; the Test-act is re- 
pealed, and a man can be a captain in the army, or a 
post-master in a village, without first taking the Lord's 
Supper after the fashion of the Church of England, 
Some men demand the abandonment of tithes, the entire 
separation of Church and State, the return to " the volun- 
tary principle " in religion ; " the battering ram which 
levelled old Sarum" and other boroughs as corrupt, now 
beats on the Church, and the " Church is in danger." 
Men complain of the decline of Piety in England. An 
intelligent and very serious writer, not long ago lamenting 
this decline, in proof thereof relates, that formerly men 
began their last wills " In the name of God Amen " ; and 
headed bills of lading with " Shipped in good order, by 
the grace of God"; that indictments for capital crimes 
charged the culprit with committing felony •' at the insti- 
gation of the Devil " : and now he complains that these 
forms have gone out of use. 

In America, in New England, in Boston, when meas- 
ured by that standard, the same decline of Piety is appar- 
ent. It is often said that our material condition is bet- 
ter than our moral ; that in advance of our spiritual con- 
dition. There is a common clerical complaint of a certain 
thinness in the churches ; men do not give their bodily 
attendance, as once they did ; they are ready enough to 
attend lectures, two or three in a week, no matter how 
scientific and abstract, or how little connected with their 
daily work, yet they cannot come to the church without 
teasing beforehand, nor keep awake while there. It is 
said the minister is not respected as formerly ; true, a 
man of power is respected, heard, sought, and followed, 
but it is for his power, for his words of grace and truth, 
not for his place in a pulpit ; he may have more influence 
as a man, but less as a clergyman. Ministers lament a 
prevalent disbelief of their venerable doctrines ; that there 
is a concealed skepticism in regard to them, often not con- 
cealed. This, also, is a well-founded complaint ; the well 
known dogmas of Theology were never in worse repute ; 
there was never so large a portion of the community in 
New England who were doubtful of the Trinity, of Eter- 



46 

nal Damnation, of Total Depravity, of the Atonement, of 
the Godhead of Jesus, of the Miracles of the New Tes- 
tament, and of the truth of every word of the Bible. A 
complaint is made, that the rites and forms which are 
sometimes called the Ordinances of Keligion, are neglect- 
ed ; that few men join the church, and though the old 
hedge is broken down before the altar, yet the number of 
communicants diminishes, and it is no longer able-headed 
men, the leaders of society, who come ; that the ordi- 
nances seem haggard and ghastly to young men, who 
cannot feed their hungry souls on such a thin pittance of 
spiritual aliment as these afford ; that the children are not 
baptized. These things are so ; so in Europe, Catholic 
and Protestant, so in America, so in Boston. Notwith- 
standing the well-founded complaint that our modern 
churches are too costly for the times, we do not build tem- 
ples w^hich bear so high a proportion to our wealth as the 
early churches of Boston ; the attendance at meeting 
does not increase as the population ; the ministers are not 
prominent, as in the days of Wilson, of Cotton, and of 
Norton ; their education is not now in the same proportion 
to the general culture of the times. Harvard College, 
dedicated to " Christ and the Church," designed at first 
chiefly for the education of the clergy, graduates few min- 
isters ; theological literature no longer overawes all other. 
The number of church members was never so small in 
proportion to the voters as now ; the number of Protest- 
ant births never so much exceeded the number of Prot- 
estant baptisms. Young men of superior ability and 
superior education have little affection for the ministry ; 
take little interest in the welfare of the Church. Nay, 
youths descended from a wealthy family seldom look that 
way. It is poor men's sons, men of obscure family, who 
fill the pulpits, — often, likewise, men of slender ability, 
eked out with an education proportionately scant. The 
most active members of the churches are similar in posi- 
tion, abihty, and culture. These are undeniable facts. 
They are not pecuhar to New England. You find them 
wherever the voluntary principle is resorted to. In Eng- 
land, in Catholic countries, you find the old historic names 



47 

in the Established Church ; there is no lack of aristocratic 
blood in clerical veins; but there and everywhere the 
church seems falling astern of all other craft that can 
keep the sea. 

Since these things are so, men who have only the con- 
ventional standard wherewith to measure the amount of 
Piety, only that test to prove its existence by, think we 
are rapidly going to decay ; that the Tabernacle is fallen 
down, and no man rises to set it up. They complain that 
Zion is in distress ; theological newspapers lament that 
that there are no revivals to report ; that " the Lord has 
withheld His arm," and does not " pour out His Spirit 
upon the churches." Ghastly meetings are held by men 
with sincere and noble heart, but saddened face ; speech- 
es are made which seem a groan of linked wailings long 
drawn out. Men mourn at the Infidelity of the times, 
at the coldness of some, at the deadness of others. All 
the sects complain of this, yet each loves to attribute the 
deadness of the rival sects to their special theology ; it is 
Unitarianism which is choking the Unitarians, say their 
foes, and the Unitarians know how to retort after the 
same fashion. The less enlightened put the blame of this 
misfortune on the good God who has somehow "withheld 
His hand," or omitted to "pour out His Spirit" — the 
people perishing for want of the open vision : others put 
the blame on mankind ; some on " poor human nature," 
which is not what might have been expected, not perceiv- 
ing that if the fault be there it is not for us to remedy, 
and if God made man a bramble-bush, that no wailing 
will make him bear figs ; yet others refer this condition 
to the use made of human nature, which certainly is a 
more philosophical way of looking at the matter. 

Now there is one sect which has done great service in 
former days, which is, I think, still doing something to 
enlighten and liberalize the land, and, I trust, will yet do 
more, more even than it consciously intends. The name 
of Unitarian is deservedly dear to many of us, who yet 
will not be shackled by any denominational fetters. This 
sect has always been remarkable for a certain gentleman- 
ly reserve about all that pertained to the inward part of 



48 

Religion ; other faults it might have, but it did not incur 
the reproach of excessive enthusiasm, or a spirituality 
too sublimated and transcendental for daily use. This 
sect has long been a speckled bird among the denomina- 
tions, each of which has pecked at her, or at least cawed 
with most unmelodious croak against this new fledged sect. 
It was said the Unitarians had " denied the Lord that 
bought them ; " that their's was the church of Unbelief 
— not the church of Christ, but of No-Christ ; that they 
had a Bible of their own, and a thin, poor Bible, too ; 
that their ways were ways of destruction ; " touch not, 
taste not, handle not," was to be written on their doc- 
trines ; that they had not even the Grace of Lukewarm- 
ness, but were moral and stone-cold ; that they looked fair 
on the side turned towards man, but on the God ward side 
it was a blank wall with no gate, nor window, nor loophole, 
nor eyelet for the Holy Spirit to come through ; that their 
prayers were only a snow of devotion to cover up the hard 
rock of the flinty heart, or the frozen ground of morality. 
Their Faith, it was said, was only a conviction after the 
case was proven by unimpeachable evidence, and good 
for nothing, for belief without evidence, or against proof, 
seems to be the right ecclesiastical talisman. For a long 
time that sect did not grumble unduly, but set itself to 
promote the cultivation of Reason and apply that to Re- 
ligion ; to cultivate Morality and apply it to Life ; and to 
demand the most entire personal freedom for all men in 
all matters pertaining to Religion. Hence came its mer- 
its ; they were very great merits, too, and not at all the 
merits of the times, held in common with the other sects. 
I need not dwell on this, and the good works of Unitari- 
anism, in this the most Unitarian city in the world ; but 
as a general thing the Unitarians, it seems to me, did 
neglect the culture of Piety, and of course their morality, 
while it lasted, would be unsatisfactory, and in time would 
wither and dry up, because it had no deepness of earth 
to grow out of. The Unitarians, as a general thing, be- 
gan without and sought to work inward, proceeding from 
the special to the general, by what might be called the 
inductive mode of religious culture ; that was the form 



49 

adopted in pulpits, and in families so far as there was any 
religious education attempted in private. Now that is not 
the method of Nature, where all growth is the develop- 
ment of a living germ, which by an inward power appro- 
priates the outward things it needs, and grows thereby. 
Hence came the defects of Unitarianism, and they were 
certainly very great defects ; but they came almost una- 
voidably from the circumstances of the times. The Sensa- 
tional Philosophy was the only Philosophy that prevailed ; 
the Orthodox sects had always rejected a part of that 
Philosophy, not in the name of Science, but of Piety, and 
they supplied its place not with a better Philosophy, but 
with Tradition, speaking with an authority which claimed 
to be above Human Nature. It was not in the name of 
Reason that they rejected a false Philosophy, but in the 
name of Religion often denounced all Philosophy and the 
Reason which demanded it. The Unitarians rejected that 
portion of Orthodoxy, became more consistent Sensation- 
alists, and arrived at results which we know. Now it is 
easy to see their error ; not difficult to avoid it ; but forty 
or fifty years ago it was almost impossible not to fall into 
this mistake. Sometimes it seems as if the Unitarians 
were half conscious of this defect, and so dared not be orig- 
inal, but borrowed Orthodox weapons, or continued to use 
Trinitarian phrases long after they had blunted those 
weapons of their point, and emptied the phrases of their 
former sense. In the controversy between the Orthodox 
and Unitarians, neither party was wholly right : the Uni- 
tarians had reason to charge the Orthodox with debasing 
man's nature, and representing God as not only unworthy, 
but unjust, and somewhat odious ; the Trinitarians were 
mainly right in charging us with want of conscious Piety, 
with beginning to work at the wrong end ; but at the same 
time it must be remembered, that, in proportion to their 
numbers, the Unitarians have furnished far more Philan- 
thropists and Reformers than any of the other sects. It 
is time to confess this on both sides. 

For a long time the Unitarian sect did not complain 
much of the decline of Piety ; it did not care to have 
an organization, loving personal freedom too well for that, 
5 



50 

and it had not much denominational feeling ; indeed, its 
members were kept together not so much bj an agreement 
and unity of opinion among themselves, as by a unity of 
opposition from without ; it was not the hooks on their 
shields that held the legion together with even front, but 
the pressure of hostile shields crowded upon them from 
all sides. They did not believe in spasmodic action ; if a 
body was dead, they gave it burial, without trying to gal- 
vanize it into momentary life, not worth the spark it cost ; 
they knew that a small cloud may make ^ good many 
flashes in the dark, but that many lightnings cannot make 
light ; so they stood apart from the violent efforts of other 
churches to get converts. The converts they got com- 
monly adhered to their faith, and in this respect differed 
a good deal from those whom '' Revivals " brought into 
other churches ; with whom Christianity sprung up in a 
night, and in a night also perished. Some years ago, 
when this city was visited and ravaged by Revivals, the 
Unitarians kept within doors, gave warning of the danger, 
and suffered less harm and loss from that tornado than 
any of the sects. Unitarianism seems, in this city, to 
have done its original work ; so the company is breaking 
up by degrees, and the men are going off, to engage in 
other business, to weed other old fields, or to break up 
new land, each man following his own sense of duty, and 
for himself determining whether to go or stay. But at 
the same time, an attempt is made to keep the company 
together ; to cultivate a denominational feeling ; to put 
hooks and staples on the shields which no longer offer that 
formidable and even front ; to teach all trumpets to give the 
same sectarian bray, all voices to utter the same war-cry. 
The attempt does not succeed ; the ranks are disordered, 
the trumpets give an uncertain sound, and the soldiers do 
not prepare themselves for denominational battle ; nay, 
it often happens that the camp lacks the two sinews of 
war — both money and men. Hence the denominational 
view of religious affairs has undergone a change ; I make 
no doubt a real and sincere change, though I know this 
has been denied, and the change thought only official. 
The men I refer to are sincere and devout men ; some of 



51 

tliem quite above the suspicion of mere official conduct. 
This sect is now the loudest in its wailing ; these Christian 
Jeremiahs tell us that we do not realize spiritual things, 
that we are all dead men, that there is no health in us. 
These cold Unitarian Thomases crowd unwontedly to- 
gether in public to bewail the spiritual weather, the dearth 
of Piety in Boston, the " general decline of Religion" in 
New England. Church unto church raises the Macedon- 
ian cry : " Come over and help us." The opinion seems 
general that Piety is in a poor way, and must have watch- 
ers, the strongest medicine, and nursing quite unusual, 
or it will soon be all over, and Unitarianism will give up 
the ghost. Various causes have I heard assigned for 
the malady : some think that there has been over much 
preaching of Philosophy — though perhaps there is not 
evidence to convict any one man in particular of the 
offence ; that Philosophy is the dog in the manger, who 
keeps the hungry Unitarian flock from their spiritual 
hay and cut straw, which are yet of not the smallest use 
to him — but look never so sharp, and you do not find 
this dangerous beast in the neighbourhood of the fold. 
Others think that there has been also an excess of Moral 
Preaching — against the prevalent sins of the nation, I 
suppose — but few individuals seem liable to conviction on 
that charge. Yet others think this decline comes from 
the fact that the Terrors have not been duly and suffi- 
ciently administered from the pulpit ; that while Catholics 
and Methodists thrive under such influences, the Unitarian 
widows are neglected in the weekly ministration of terror 
and of threat ; that there has not been so much an excess 
of Lightning in the form of Philosophy or Morality, but 
only a lack of Thunder. 

This temporary movement among the Unitarians of 
Boston is natural ; in some respects it is what our fathers 
would have called "judicial." The Unitarians have been 
cold, have looked more at the outward manifestations of 
Goodness than at the inward spirit of Piety which was to 
make the manifestations ; they have not had an excess of 
Philosophy, or of Morality, but a defect of Piety. They 
have been more respectable than pious. They have not 



52 

always quite rightly appreciated the enthusiasm of sterner 
and more austere sects ; not always done justice to the 
inwardness of Religion those sects sought to promote. 
When their churches get a little thin, and their denomi- 
national affairs a little disturbed, it is quite natural these 
Unitarians should look after the cause and pass over to 
lamentations at the present state of things ; while looking 
at the community from the new point of view, it is quite 
natural that they should suppose Piety on the decline, and 
Keligion a-dying out. Yes, in general it is plain that, if 
men have no eyes but conventional eyes, no spirit but that 
of the ecclesiastical order they serve in and of the denom- 
ination they belong to, it is natural for them to think that 
because Piety does not flow in the old ecclesiastical chan- 
nel, it does not flow anywhere, and there is none at all to 
run. Thus it is easy to explain the complaint of the 
Catholics at the great defection of the most enlightened 
nations of Europe ; the lamentation of the Protestants at 
the heresy of the most enhghtened portion of their sect ; 
and the Unitarian wail over the general decline of Piety 
in the city of Boston. Some men can only judge the 
present age by the conventional standard of the Past, 
and as the old form of Piety does not appear, they must 
conclude there is no Piety. 



Let us now recur to the other or natural standard, 
and look at the manifestation of Piety in the form of 
Morality. Last Sunday I spoke of our moral condition, 
and it appeared that morals were in a low state here 
when compared with the ideal morals of Christianity. 
Now" as the outward deed is but the manifestation of the 
inward life, and objective Humanity the index of subjec- 
tive Divinity ; so the low state of morals proves a low 
state of Piety : if the heart of this town was right towards 
God, then would its hand also be right towards man. I 
am one of those who for long years have lamented the 
want of vital Piety in this people. We not only do not 
realize spiritual things, but we do not make them our 
Ideals. I see proofs of this want of Piety in the low 



53 

morals of Trade, of the public Press ; in Poverty, Intem- 
perance, and Crime ; in the vices and social wrongs 
touched on the last Sunday. I judge the tree by its 
fruit. But it is not on this ground that the ecclesiastical 
complaint is based. Men who make so much ado about 
the absence of Piety, do not appeal for proof thereof to 
the great Vices and prominent Sins of the times ; they 
see no sign of that in our Trade and our Pohtics ; in the 
Misery that festers in putrid lanes, one day to breed a 
pestilence, which it were even cheaper to hinder now, 
than cure at a later time ; nobody mentions as proof the 
Mexican War, the political dishonesty of men, the rapaci- 
ty of office-seekers, the servility of men who will tamely 
suffer the most sacred Rights of three millions of men to 
be trodden into the dust. Matters which concern mil- 
lions of men came up before your Congress ; the great 
Senator of Massachusetts loitered away the time of the 
session here in Boston, managing a law suit for a few 
thousand dollars, and no fault was publicly found with 
such neglect of public duty ; but men see no lack of 
Piety indicated by this fact, and others like it ; they find 
signs of that lack in empty pews, in a deserted commun- 
ion-table, in the fact that children, though brought up to 
reverence Truth and Justice, to love man and to love 
God, are not baptized with water ; or in the fact that Uni- 
tarianism or Trinitarianism is on the decline ! How many 
wailings have we all heard or read, because the Puritan 
churches of Boston have not kept the faith of their grim 
founders ; what lamentations at the rising up of a sect 
Avhich refuses the doctrine of the Trinity, or at the ap- 
pearance of a few men who, neglecting the common props 
of Christianity, rest it, for its basis, 'on the nature of Man 
and the nature of God : though almost all the eminent 
Philanthropy of the day is connected with these men, yet 
they are still called "Infidel," and reviled on all hands ! 

The state of things mentioned in the last sermon does 
indicate a want of Piety, a deep and a great want. I do 
not see signs of that in the debt and decay of churches, 
in absence from meetings, in doubt of theological dogmas, 
in neglect of forms and ceremonies which once were of 
5* 



54 

great value : but I do see it in the low morals of Trade, 
of tlie Press ; in the popular vices. On a national scale 
I see it in the depravity of political parties, in the wicked 
war we have just fought ; in the Slavery we still tolerate 
and support. Yes, as I look on the churches of this city, 
I do see a want of Piety in the midst of us. If eminent 
Piety were in them, and allowed to follow its natural bent, 
it would come out of them in the form of eminent Hu- 
manity ; they would lead in the Philanthropies of this 
day, where they hardly follow. In this condition of the 
churches I see a most signal proof of the low estate of 
Piety ; they do not manifest a Love of Truth, which is 
the Piety of the Intellect ; nor a Love of Justice, which 
is the Piety of the Moral Sense ; nor a Love of Love, 
.which is the Piety of the Affections ; nor a Love of God 
as the Infinite Father of all men, which is the total Piety of 
the whole Soul. For lack of this internal Divinity there 
is a lack of external Humanity. Who can bring a clean 
thing out of an unclean ? This is what I complain of, 
what I mourn over. 

The clergymen of this city are most of them sincere 
men, I doubt not ; some of them men of a superior cul- 
ture ; many of them laborious men ; most, perhaps all of 
them, deeply interested in the welfare of the churches, 
and the promotion of Piety. But how many of them are 
marked and known for their Philanthropy, distinguished 
for their zeal in putting down any of the major sins of 
our day ; zealous in any work of Reform ? I fear I can 
count them all on the fingers of a single hand ; yet there 
are enough to bewail the departure of monastic forms, 
and of the theology wljich led men in the dimness of a 
darker age, but cannot shine in the rising light of this. I 
find no fault with these men ; I blame them not, 'tis their 
profession that so blinds theiv eyes. They are as wise 
and as valiant as the churches let them be. What sect 
in all this land ever cared about Temperance, Education, 
Peace betwixt nations, or even the Freedom of all men in 
our own, so much as this sect cares for the baptizing of 
children with water, and that for the baptizing of men ; 
this for the doctrine of the Trinity, and all for the infal- 



65 

libility of the Bible ? Do you ask the sects to engage in 
the work of extirpating concrete wrong ? It is in vain ; 
each Reformer tries it — the mild sects answer, " I pray 
thee have me excused ; " the sterner sects reply with 
awful speech. A distinguished theological journal of an- 
other city thinks the Philanthropies of this clay are hostile 
to Piety, and declares that true spiritual Christianity 
never prevails where men think Slavery is a sin. A dis- 
tinguished minister of a highly respectable sect declares 
the Temperance Societies unchristian, and even atheisti- 
cal. He reasons thus : the Church is an instrument ap- 
pointed by God and Christ to overcome all forms of wrong, 
Intemperance among the rest ; to neglect this instrument 
and devise another, a Temperance Society, to wit, is to 
abandon the institutions of God and Christ, and so it is 
unchristian and atheistical. In other words, here is In- 
temperance, a, stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, 
in our way ; there is an old wooden beetle, which has 
done great service of old time, and is said to have been 
made by God's own hand ; men smite therewith the stone 
or smite it not ; still it lies there a stone of stumbling 
and a stone of shame ; other men approach, and with a 
sledge-hammer of well tempered steel smite the rock, 
and break off piece after piece, smoothing the rough im- 
practicable way ; they call on men to come to their aid, 
with such weapons as they will. But our minister bids 
them beware : the beetle is " of the Lord," the iron which 
breaks the rock in pieces is an unchristian and atheistical 
instrument. Yet was this minister an earnest, a pious, 
and a self-denying man — who sincerely sought the good 
of men. He had been taught to know no Piety but in 
the Church's form. I would not do dishonor to the 
churches; they have done great service, they still do 
much ; I would only ask them to be worthy of their 
Christian name. They educate men a little, and allow 
them to approach emancipation, but never to be free and 
go alone. 

I see much to complain of in the condition of Piety ; 
yet nothing to be alarmed at. When I look back it seems 



56 

worse still, far worse. There has not been '^ a decline of 
Piety " in Boston of late years. Religion is not sick. 
Last Sunday I spoke of the great progress made in moral- 
ity within fifty years ; I said it was an immense progress 
within two hundred years. Now there cannot be such a 
progress in the outward manifestation without a corre- 
sponding and previous development of the inward princi- 
ple. Morality cannot grow without Piety more than an 
Oak without water, earth, and sun, and air. Let me go 
back one hundred years ; see what a difference between 
the religious aspect of things then and now ! certainly 
there has been a great growth in spirituality since that 
day. I am not to judge men's hearts ; I may take their 
outward lives as the test and measure of their inward 
Piety. Will you say the outward life never completely 
comes up to that ? It does so as completely now as then. 
Compare the toleration of these times with those ; com- 
pare the intelHgence of the community ; the temperance, 
sobriety, chastity, virtue in general. Look at what is now 
done in a municipal way by towns and states for man- 
kind ; see the better provision made for the poor, for the 
deaf, the dumb, the blind, for the insane, even for the 
idiot ; see what is done for the Education of the People 
— in schools, academies, colleges, and by public lectures ; 
what is done for the criminal, to prevent the growth of 
Crime. See what an amelioration of the penal laws ; how 
men are saved and restored to society, who had once been 
wholly lost. See what is done by Philanthropy still more 
eminent — which the Town and State have not yet over- 
taken and enacted into Law ; by the various societies for 
Reform, — those for Temperance, for Peace, for the disci- 
pline of Prisons, for the Discharged Convicts, for freeing 
the Slave. See this Anti-Slavery party, which in twenty 
years has become so powerful throughout all the North- 
ern States, so strong that it cannot be howled down, 
and men begin to find it hardly safe to howl over it ; 
a party which only waits the time to lift up its million 
arms and hurl the hateful institution of Slavery out of the 
land ! All these humane movements come from a divine 
Piety in the soul of man ; a tree which bears such fruits 



57 

is not a dead tree ; is not wholly to be despaired of; is 
not yet in a " decline " and past all hope of recovery. 
Is the age wanting in Piety, which makes such efforts as 
these ? Yes, you will sa}^, because it does no more. I 
agree to this, but it is rich in Piety compared to other 
times. Ours is an Age of Faith ; not of mere belief in the 
commandments of men, but of Faith in the Nature of 
Man and the Commandments of God. 

This prevailing and contagious complaint about the 
decline of Religion is not one of the new things of our 
time. In the beginning of the last century, Dr. Col- 
man, first minister of the church in Brattle street, lament- 
ed in small capitals over the general decline of Piety ; 
'' the venerable name of Religion and of the Church is 
made a sham-pretence for the worst of villanies, for un- 
charitablencss and unnatural oppression of the pious and 
the peaceable ; " " the perilous times are come wherein 
men are lovers only of their own selves." " Ah, calami- 
tous day," says he, " into which we are fallen, and into 
which the sins of our infatuated age have bro't us." He 
looks back to the Founders of New England ; they " were 
rich in faith, and heirs of a better world," men of whom 
the world was not worthy ; " " they laid in a stock of 
prayers for us which have bro't down many blessings on 
us already." Samuel Willard bewailed " the checkered 
state of the Gospel Church;" it was "in every respect a 
gloomy day and covered with thick clouds." 

We retire yet further back, to the end of the seven- 
teenth century ; a hundred and sixty or seventy years 
ago. Dr. Increase Mather, not only in his own pulpit but 
also at " the great and Thursday Lecture," lamented 
over " the degeneracy and departing glory of New Eng- 
land." He complained that there was a neglect of the 
Sabbath, of the Ordinances, and of Family-worship ; he 
groaned at the lax discipline of the churches, and looked, 
says another, " as fearfully on the growing charity, as on 
the growing vices of the age." He called the existing 
generation " an unconverted generation." " Atheism and 
prophaneness," says he, " have come to a prodigious 
height;" "God will visit" for these things; "God is 



58 

about to open the windows of heaven and pour down the 
cataracts of His wrath ere this generation ... is 
passed away." If a comet appeared in the sky, it was 
to admonish men of the visitation, and make '' the 
haughty daughters of Zion reform their pride of ap- 
parel." " The world is full of Unbelief," (that is, in the 
malignant aspect and disastrous influence of comets,) 
" but there is an awful Scripture for them that do pro- 
phanely condemn such signal works ! " 

One of the present and well known indications of the 
decline of Piety, that is often thought a modern luxury 
and ridiculously denounced in the pulpit, which has done 
its part in fostering the enjoyment, was practised to an 
extent which alarmed the prim shepherds of the New 
England flock in earlier days: the same Dr. Mather 
preached a series of sermons tending " to promote the 
Power of Godliness," and concludes the whole with a dis- 
course " of Sleeping at Sermons," and says : " To sleep 
in the public worship of God is a thing too frequently 
and easily practised ; it is a great and a dangerous evil ; 
. . . sleeping at a sermon is a greater sin than speak- 
ing an idle word. Therefore, if men must be called to 
account for idle words, much more for this ! . . . Gos- 
pel sermons are among the most precious Talents which 
any in this world have conferred upon them. But what 
a sad account will be given concerning those sermons 
which have been slept away ! As light as thou makest of 
it now, it may be conscience will roar for it upon a death 
bed ! . . . Verily there is many a soul that will find 
this to be a dismal thought at the day of Judgment, when 
he shall remember so many sermons I might have heard 
for my everlasting benefit, but I slighted and slept them 
all away. Therefore consider, if men allow themselves 
in this evil their souls are in danger to perish." "It is 
true that a godly man may be subject unto this as well 
as unto other infirmities ; but he doth not allow himself 
therein." " The name of the glorious God is greatly 
prophaned by this inadvertency. . . . The support 
of the evangelical ministry is . . discouraged." He 
thought the character of the pulpit was not sufficient ex- 



59 

planation of this phenomenon, and adds, in his supernat- 
ural way : " Satan is the external cause of this evil. . . 
He had rather have men -vvakcful at any time than at ser- 
mon time." The good man mentions by way of example 
a man who " had not slept a wink at a sermon for more 
than twenty years together," and also, but by way of 
warning, the unlucky youth in the Acts who slept at 
Paul's long sermon, and fell out of the window and " was 
taken up dead." Sleeping was " adding something of 
our own to the worship of God, . . . when Nadab 
and Abihu did so there went out fire from the Lord and 
consumed them to death. . . . The holy God hath 
been not a little displeased for this sin. . . . It is 
not punished by men, but therefore the Lord himself will 
visit for it. . . . Tears of blood will trickle down thy 
dry and damned cheeks forever and ever, because thou 
mayest not be so happy as to hear one sermon, or to have 
one offer of Grace more throughout the never ending 
dayes of eternity." Other men denounced their " Wo to 
Sleepy Sinners," and issued their " Proposals for the 
Revival of dying Religion." 

Dr. Mather thought there was " a deluge of prophane- 
ness," and bid men "be much in mourning and humil- 
iation that God's bottle may be filled with tears." He 
thought Piety was going out because surplices were 
coming in ; it was wicked to " consecrate a church " ; 
keeping Christmas was " like the idolatry of the Calf." 
The Common-Prayer, an organ, a musical instrument in 
a church, was "not of God" ; such things were to our 
worthy fathers in the ministry what Temperance and 
Anti-Slavery societies are to many of their sons — an 
" abomination," " unchristian and atheistic ! " The intro- 
duction of " regular singing " was an indication to some 
that " all religion is to cease " ; "we might as well go 
over to Popery at once." Inoculation for the small-pox 
was as vehemently and ably opposed as the modern 
attempt to abolish the gallows ; it was " a trusting more 
to the machinations of men than to the all-wise providence 
of God." 

" When the enchantments of this world," says the 



60 

ecclesiastical historian, ^' caused the rising generation 
more sensibly to neglect the primitive designs and inter- 
ests of religion propounded by their fathers ; a change in 
the tenour of the divine dispensation towards this country 
was quickly the matter of every one's observation. . 
Our wheat and our pease fell under an unaccountable 
blast. . . . We were visited with multiplied ship- 
wrecks ; . . . pestilential sicknesses did sometimes 
become epidemic among us. . . . Indians cruelly 
butchered many hundreds of ovir inhabitants, and scat- 
tered whole towns with miserable ruins. . . . The 
serious people throughout the land were awakened by 
these intimations of divine displeasure to enquire into the 
causes and matters of the controversie." Accordingly, 
in 1679, a synod was convened at Boston, to " inquire 
into the causes of the Lord's controversie with his New 
England people," who determined the matter.* A little 



* The Synod declai*ed : " That God hath a Controversie with his New 
England People is undeniable." There are visible manifest Evils, which 
without doubt the Lord is provoked by. 1 . " A great and visible decay 
of the Power of Godliness amongst many Professors in these Churches." 
2. " Pride doth abound in New England. Many have offended God by 
strange apparel." 3. " Church Fellowship and other Divine Institutions 
are grossly neglected." " Quakers are false Worshippers, . - . and 
Anabaptists ... do no better than set up an Altar against the 
Lord's Altar." 4. " The holy and glorious name of God hath been pol- 
luted;" "because of swearing the Land mourns." "It is a frequent 
thing for men to sit in Prayer-time . . . and to give way to their 
own Sloth and Sleepiness. . . , We read of but one Man in Scrip- 
ture that slept at a sermon, and that Sin had like to have cost him his 
Life." 5. " There is much Sabbath-breaking ; since there are multitudes 
that do profanely absent themselves from the publick Worship of God, 
. . . walking abroad and travelling . . . being a common prac- 
tice on the Sabbath Day." "Worldly unsuitable Discourses are very 
common upon the Lord's Day." " This brings Wrath, Fires, and other 
Judgments upon a professing people." G. "As to what concerns Fami- 
lies and Government thereof, there is much amiss." "Children and 
Servants . . . are not kept in due subjection. . . . This is a Sin 
which brings great Judgments as Ave see in Eli's and David's family." 
7. "Inordinate Passions, Sinful Heats and Hatreds, and that amongst 
Church Members." 8. " There is much Intemperance " : " it is a com- 
mon practice for Town-Dwellers yea, and Church-Members, to frequent 
publick Houses, and there to misspend precious Time." 9. " There is 
much want of Truth amongst men." " The Lord is not wont to suffer 
such Iniquity to pass unpunished." 10. " Inordinate Affection unto the 
world." " There hath been in many Professors an Insatiable desire after 



I 



61 

later, in 1690, the General Court considered the subject 
anew, and declared, that " a corruption of manners 
attended with inexcusable degeneracies and apostacies 
. . . is the cause of the controversie." We " are 
now arriving at such an extremity that the ax is laid to 
the root of the trees, and we are in eminent danger of 
perishing if a speedy Reformation of our provoking evils 
prevent it not." In 1702, Cotton Mather complains 
that " our manifold indispositions to recover the dying 
power of Godliness were successive calamities under all 
of which our apostacies from that Godliness have rather 
proceeded than abated. . . . The old spirit of New 
England has been sensibly going out of the world as the 
old saints in whom it was have ^one ; and instead thereof 
the spirit of the world with a lamentable neglect of strict 
piety has crept in upon the rising generation," 

You go back to the time of the Founders and Fathers 
of the Colony, and it is no better. In 1667, Mr. Wilson, 
who had " a singular gift in the practice of discipline," 
on his death-bed declared, that " God would judge the 
people for their rebellion and self willed spirit, for their 
contempt of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, and for their 
luxury and sloth," and before that he said, " people rise 
up as Corah, against their ministers. . . . And for 
our neglect of baptizing the children of the church . 
I think God is provoked by it. Another sin I take to be 
the making light ... of the authority of the Syn- 
ods." John Norton, whose piety was said to be " Grace 



Land, and "Worldly Accommodations ; yea so as to forsake Churches and 
Ordinances, and to live like Heathen, only so that they might have 
Elbow-room in the World. Farms and Merchandisings have been pre- 
ferred before the things of God." " Such Iniquity causeth War to be in 
the G:ite, and Cities to be burned up." " When Lot did forsake the Land 
of Canaan and the Church which was in Abraham's Family, that so he 
might have better Worldly Accommodations in Sodom, God fired him 
out of all." " There are some Traders that sell their Goods at excessive 
Rates; Day-Laborers and Mechanicks are unreasonable in their de- 
mands." 11. "There hath been opposition to the work of Reforma- 
tion." 12. "A publick spirit is greatly wanting in the most of men." 
13. " There are sins against the gospel, whereby the Lord has been 
provoked." " Christ is not prised and embraced in all his Offices and 
Ordinances as ought to be." 

6 



62 

grafted on a crab-stock," in 1660 growled after his wont 
on account of the " Heart of New England rent with the 
blasphemies of this generation." John Cotton, the ablest 
man in New England, who " liked to sweeten his mouth 
with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep," and was 
so pious that another could not swear while he was under 
the roof, mourned at " the condition of the churches," 
and in 1652, on his death-bed, after bestowing his blessing 
on the President of Harvard College, who had begged 
it of him, exhorted the elders to " increase their watch 
against those declensions which he saw the professors of 
religion falling into."* In 1641, such was the condition of 
Piety in Boston, that it was thought necessary to banish 
a man because he did not believe in original sin; in 1639, 
a fast was appointed, " to deplore the prevalence of the 
small-pox, the want of zeal in the Professors of Religion, 
and the general decay of Piety." " The church of God 
had not long been in this wilderness," — thus complains 
a minister one hundred and fifty years ago, — "before the 
Dragon cast forth several floods to devour it ; but not the 
least of these floods was one of the Antinomian and fami- 
hstical heresies. . . . 'T is incredible what aliena- 
tions of mind and what a very calenture the Devil raised 
in the country upon this odd occasion." "The sectaries" 
" began usually to seduce women into their notions, and 
by these women, like their first mother, they soon hooked 
in the husbands also." So in 1637 the Synod of Cam- 
bridge was convened, to dispatch " the apostate serpent" : 

* In 1646, Mr. Samuel Symonds wrote to Governor Winthrop as fol- 
lows : " I will also mention the text preached upon at our last fast, and 
the propositions raised thereupon, because it was so seasonable to New 
England's condition. Jeremiah xxx. 17. For I will restore health to 
thee, and heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord ; because they called 
thee an outcast, saying. This is Zion whom noe man careth for. 

" 1 Prop. That sick tymes doe passe over Zion. 

" 2 That sad and bitter neglect is the portion, aggravation and 
affliction of Zion in the tyme of its sicknesse and wounds, but especially 
in the neglect of those that doe neglect it, and yet notwithstanding doe 
acknowledge it to be Zion. 

" 3 That the season of penitent Zion's passion, is the season of God's 
compassion. 

" This sermon tended much to the settling of Godly minds here in God's 
way, and to raise their spirits and as I conceive hath sutable effects." 



one woman was duly convicted of holding " about thirty 
monstrous opinions," and subsequently by the civil author- 
ity banished from the colony. The Synod, after much 
time was " spent in ventilation and emptying of private 
passions," condemned eighty-two opinions, then prevalent 
in the colony, as erroneous, and decided to " refer doubts 
to be resolved by the great God." Even in 1G36, John 
Wilson lamented " the dark and distracted condition of 
the churches of New England." 

" The good old times," when Piety was in a thriving 
state, and the churches successful and contented, lay as 
far behind the "famous Johns" as it now does behind 
their successors in office and lamentation. Then as now 
the complaint had the same foundation : ministers and 
other good men could not see that new piety will not be 
put into the old forms — neither the old forms of Thought 
nor the old forms of Action. In the days of "Wilson, 
Cotton, and Norton, there was a gradual growth of piety ; 
in the days of the Mathers, of Colman, and Willard, and 
from that time to this, there has been a steady improve- 
ment of the community in intellectual, moral, and relig- 
ious culture. Some men could not see the progress two 
hundred years ago, because they believed in no piety 
except as it was manifested in their conventional forms : 
it is so now. Mankind advances by the irresistible law 
of God, under the guidance of a few men of large dis- 
course, who look before and after, but amid the wailing of 
many who think each advance is a retreat, and every 
stride a stumble. 

Nowadays nobody complains at " the ungodly custom 
of wearing long hair" ; no dandy is dealt with by the 
church, for his dress ; the weakest brother is not offended 
by "regular singing," — so it be regular, — by organs 
and the like ; nobody laments at " the reading of Scrip- 
ture lessons," or "the use of the Lord's Prayer" in 
public religious services, or is offended because a clergy- 
man makes a prayer at a funeral, and solemnizes a mar- 
riage, — though these are " prelatical customs," and were 
detested by our fathers : yet other things, now as much 
dreaded and thought " of a bad and dangerous tendency," 



64 

■vN'ill one day prove themselves as innocent, though now as 
much mourned over ; many an old doctrme will fade out, 
and though some think a star has fallen out of Heaven, a 
new truth will rise up and take its place. It is to be 
expected that ministers will often complain of " the gen- 
eral decay of religion." The position of a clergyman, 
fortunate in many things, is unhappy in this : he seldom 
sees the result of his labors except in the conventional 
form mentioned above. The lawyer, the doctor, the mer- 
chant and mechanic, the statesman and the farmer, all 
have visible and palpable results of their work, while the 
minister can only see that he has baptized men and ad- 
mitted them to his church ; the visible and quotable to- 
kens of his success are a large audience, respectable and 
attentive, a thriving Sunday school, or a considerable 
body of communicants. If these signs fail, or become 
less than formerly, he thinks he has labored in vain ; that 
Piety is on the decline, for it is only by this form that he 
commonly tests and measures Piety itself. Hence a sin- 
cere and earnest minister, with the limitations which he so 
easily gets from his profession and social position, is al- 
ways prone to think ill of the times, to undervalue the 
new wine which refuses to be kept in the old bottles, but 
rends them asunder ; hence he bewails the decline of re- 
ligion, and looks longingly back to the days of his fathers. 
But you will ask, Why does not a minister demand 
Piety in its natural form ? Blame him not ; unconsciously 
he fulfils his contract, and does what he is taught, or- 
dained, and paid for doing. It is safe for a minister to 
demand Piety of his parish ; not safe to demand it in the 
form of Morality — eminent Piety in the form of Philan- 
thropy : it Avould be an innovation ; it would " hurt men's 
feelings " ; it might disturb some branches of business ; 
at the North it would interfere with the liquor-trade ; at 
the South with the slave-trade ; everywhere it would de- 
mand what many men do not like to give. If a man asks 
Piety in the form of bodily attendance at church on the 
only idle day in the week, when business and amusement 
must be refrained from ; in the form of belief in doctrines 
which are commonly accepted by the denomination, and 



65 

compliance with its forms, — that is customary ; it hurts 
nobody's feehngs ; it does not disturb the Hquor-trade nor 
the slave-trade ; it interferes with nothing, not even with 
respectable sleep in a comfortable pew. A minister, like 
others, loves to be surrounded by able and respectable 
men ; he seeks, therefore, a congregation of such. If he 
is himself an able man, it is well ; but there are few in 
any calling whom we designate as able. Our weak man 
cannot instruct his parishioners ; he soon learns this, and 
ceases to give them counsel on matters of importance. 
They would not suffer it, for the larger includes the less, 
not the less the larger. He is not strong by nature ; their 
position overlooks and commands his. He must speak 
and give some counsel ; he wisely limits himself to things 
of but httle practical interest, and his parishioners are not 
offended : " That 's my sentiment exactly," says the most 
worldly man in the church, " religion is too pure to be 
mixed up with the practical business of the street." The 
original and effectual preaching, in such cases, is not from 
the pulpit down upon the pews, but from the pews up to 
the pulpit, which only echoes, consciously or otherwise, 
but does not speak. 

In a solar system, the central sun, not barely powerful 
from its position, is the most weighty body ; heavier than 
all the rest put together ; so with even swing they all 
revolve about it. Our little ministerial sun was ambi- 
tious of being amongst large satellites ; he is there, but 
the law of gravitation amongst men is as certain as in 
matter ; he cannot poise and swing the system ; he is not 
the Sun thereof, not even a Primary Planet, only a little 
satellite revolving with many nutations round some pri- 
mary, in an orbit that is oblique, complicated, and diffi- 
cult to calculate ; now waxing in a " Revival," now wan- 
ing in a " decline of Piety," now totally eclipsed by his 
Primary that comes between him and the light which 
lighteth every man. Put one of the cold thin moons of 
Saturn into the centre of the solar system, — would the 
universe revolve about that little dot ? Loyal matter 
with irresistible fealty gravitates towards the Sun, and 
6* 



66 

wheels around the balance-point of the world's weight, be 
it where it may, called by whatever name. 

While ministers insist unduly on the conventional man- 
ifestation of Piety, it is not a thing unheard of for a lay- 
man to resolve to go to Heaven by the ecclesiastical 
roadj yet omit resolving to be a good man before he gets 
there. Such a man finds the ordinary forms of Piety 
very convenient, and not at all burthensome ; they do 
not interfere with his daily practice of injustice and mean- 
ness of soul ; they seem a substitute for real and manly 
goodness, they offer a royal road to saintship here and 
Heaven hereafter. Is the man in arrears with Virtue, 
having long practised wickedness and become insolvent ? 
This form is a new Bankrupt law of the Spirit, he pays 
off his old debts in the ecclesiastical currency — a penny- 
worth of form for a pound of Substantial Goodness. 
This bankrupt sinner, cleared by the ecclesiastical chan- 
cery, is a solvent saint ; he exhorts at meetings, strains at 
every gnat, and mourns over " the general decay of 
Piety," and teaches other men the way in which they 
should go — to the same end. 

" So morning insects that in muck begun, 
Shine, buz, and fly-blow in the evening sun." 



I honor the founders of New England ; they were pious 
men — their lives proved it; but domineered over by false 
opinions in theology, they puj their Piety into very unnat- 
ural and perverted forms. They had Ideas which tran- 
scended their age ; they came here to make those Ideas 
into institutions. That they had great faults, bigotry, 
intolerance, and superstition, is now generally conceded. 
They were picked men, " wheat sifted out of three king- 
doms," to plant a new world withal ; they have left their 
mark very deep and very distinct in this town, which was 
their prayer and their pride. It may seem unjust to 
ourselves to compare a whole community like our own 
with such a company as filled Boston in the first half cen- 
tury of its existence, — men selected for their spiritual 
hardihood ; but here and now, in the midst of Boston, are 



67 

men quite as eminent for Pietj, who as far transcend this 
age, as the Puritans and the Pilgrims surpassed their 
time. The Puritan put his religion into the ecclesiastical 
form : not into the form of the Roman or the English 
Church, but into a new one of his own. His descendant, 
inheriting his father's Faith in God, and stern self-denial, 
but sometimes without his bigotry, intolerance, and super- 
stition, with little Fear but with more Love of God, and 
consequently with more Love of Man — puts his Piety 
into a new form ; it is not the form of the old Church : the 
Church of the Puritans is to him often what the Church 
of the Pope and the Prelates was to his ungentle sire. 
He puts his Piety into the form of Goodness ; eminent 
Piety becomes Philanthropy, and takes the shape of Re- 
form. Li such men, in many of their followers, I see the 
same Trust in God, the same scorn of compromising Right 
and Truth, the same unfaltering allegiance to the eternal 
Father, which shone in the Pilgrims who founded this new 
world, which fired the Reformers of the Church ; yes, 
which burned in the hearts of Paul and John. Piety has 
not failed and gone out; each age has its own forms 
thereof; the old and passing can never understand the 
new, nor can they consent to decrease with the increase 
of the new. Once, men put their Piety into a Church, 
Catholic or Protestant ; they made creeds and believed 
them; they devised rites and symbols, which helped their 
faith. It was well — but we cannot believe those creeds, 
nor be aided by such symbols and such rites. Why pre- 
tend to drag a weighty crutch about because it helped 
your father once, wandering alone and in the dark, sound- 
ing on his dim and perilous way ! Once earthen roads 
were the best we knew, and horses' feet had shoes of 
swiftness ; now we need not, out of reverence, refuse the 
iron road, the chariot and the steed of flame ; nor out of 
irreverence need we spurn the road our fathers trod; 
sorely bested and hunted after, tear-bedewed and travel- 
stained, they journeyed there, passing on to their God. 
If the mother that bore us were never so rude, and to 
our eyes might seem never so graceless now, still she was 
our mother, and without her we should not have been 



68 

born. Wives and children may men have, and manifold ; 
each has but one mother. The great institution we call 
the Christian church has been the mother of us all ; and 
though in her own dotage she deny our Piety, and call us 
Infidel, far be it from us to withhold the richly earned 
respect. Behind a decent veil, then, let us hide our 
mother's weakness, and ourselves pass on. Once Piety 
built up a Theocracy, and men say it was Divine ; now 
Piety, everywhere in Christendom, builds up Democra- 
cies ; it is a diviner work. 



The Piety of this age must manifest itself in Morality, 
and appear in a church where the priests are men of ac- 
tive mind and active hand ; men of Ideas, who commune 
with God and man through Faith and works, finding no 
Truth is hostile to their creed, no goodness foreign to 
their litany, no Piety discordant in their Psalm. The 
man who once would have built a convent and been its 
rigorous chief, now founds a Temperance Society, con- 
tends against war, toils for the pauper, the criminal, the 
madman, and the slave, for men bereft of senses and of 
sense. The Synod of Dort and of Cambridge, the As- 
sembly of Divines at Westminster, did what they could 
with what Piety they had ; they put it into decrees and 
platforms, into catechisms and creeds. But the various 
Conventions for Reform put their Piety into resolves and 
then into philanthropic works. I do not believe there 
has ever been an age when Piety bore so large a place in 
the whole being of New England as at this day, or at- 
tendance on church-forms so small a part. The attempts 
made and making for a better Education of the People, 
the Lectures on Science and Literature abundantly at- 
tended in this town, the increased fondness for reading, 
the better class of books which are read — all these indi- 
cate an increased Love of Truth, the intellectual part of 
Piety ; Societies for Reform and for Charity show an 
increase of the Moral and Affectional parts of Piety ; 
the better, the lovelier Idea of God which all sects are 
embracing, is a sign of increased Love of God. Thus all 



69 

parts of Pietv are proving their existence by their work. 
The very absence from the churches, the disbeUef of the 
old sour theologies, the very neglect of outward forms 
and ceremonies of religion, the decline of the ministry 
itself, under the present circumstances, shows an increase 
of Piety. The Baby-clothes were well and wide for the 
baby ; now, the fact that he cannot get them on, shows 
plainly that he has outgrown them, is a boy, and no long- 
er a baby. 

Once Piety fled to the Church as the only sanctuary 
in the waste wide world, and was fondly welcomed there, 
fed and fostered. When Power fled off from the Church 

— "Wilt thou also go away?" said she; "Lord," said 
Piety, " to whom shall we go ? Thou only hast the words 
of everlasting life." Once convents and cathedrals were 
what the world needed as shelter for this fair child of 
God ; then she dwelt in the grim edifice that our fathers 
built, and for a time counted herself '' lodged in a lodg- 
ing where good things are." Now is she grown able to 
wander forth fearless and free, lodging where the night 
overtakes her, and doing what her hands find to do, not 
unattended by the Providence which hitherto has watched 
over and blest her. I respect Piety in the Hebrew saints, 
prophets, and bards, who spoke their fiery speech, or sung 
their sweet and soul-inspiring psalm : 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burthens of the Bible old." 

I honor Piety among the saints of Greece, clad in the 
form of Philanthropy and Art, speaking still in dramas, 
in philosophies and song, and in the temple and the statue 
too: 

" Not from a vain and shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought." 

I admire at the Piety of the Middle Ages, which found- 
ed the monastic tribes of men, which wrote the theologies 

— scholastic and mystic both, still speaking to the mind 
of men, — or in poetic legends insinuated truth ; which 
built that heroic architecture, overmastering therewith the 
sense and soul of man : 



70 

" The passive master lent his hand 
To the vast soul that o'er him planned ; 
And the same Power that reared the shrine, 
Bestrode the tribes that knelt therein." 

But the Piety which I find noAV, in this age, here in our 
own land, I respect, honor, and admire yet more ; I find 
it in the form of Moral Life ; that is the Piety I love, 
Piety in her own loveliness. Would I could find poetic 
strains as fit to sing of her — but yet such 

"Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament, 
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most." 

Let me do no dishonor to other days — to Hebrew or to 
Grecian saints: unlike and hostile though they were, they 
jointly fed my soul in earliest days. I would not under- 
rate the mediaeval saints, whose words and works have 
been my study in a manlier age ; yet I love best the fair 
and vigorous Piety of our own day. It is beautiful, 
amid the strong, rank life of the nineteenth century, amid 
the steam-mills and the telegraphs which talk by lightning, 
amid the far-reaching enterprises of our time, and 'mid the 
fierce democracies — 't is beautiful to find this fragrant 
Piety growing up in unwonted forms, in places where men 
say no seed of Heaven can lodge and germinate. So in 
a June meadow, when a boy, and looking for the cran- 
berries of another year, faded and tasteless, amid the pale 
but coarse rank grass, and discontented that I found them 
not, so have I seen the crimson arethusa or the cymbidium 
shedding an unexpected loveliness o'er all the watery soil 
and all the pale and coarse rank grass, a prophecy of 
summer near at hand. So in October, when the fields 
are brown with frost, the blue and fringed gentian meets 
your eye, filling with thankful tears. 

There is no decline of Piety, but an increase of it ; a 
good deal has been done in two hundred years, in one 
hundred years, yes, in fifty years. Let us admit, with 
thankfulness of heart, that Piety is in greater proportion 
to all our activity now than ever before : but then com- 
pare ourselves with the Ideal of Human Nature, our 
Piety with the Ideal Piety, and we must confess that we 
are little and very low. Boston is the most active city in 



71 

the world, the most enterprising: in no place is it so 
easy to obtain men's ears and their purses for any good 
word and work. But think of the evils we know of and 
tolerate, think of an Ideal Christian city, then think of 
Boston ; of a Christian man, aye of Christ himself, and 
then think of you and me, — and we are filled with 
shame. If there were a true manly Piety in this town, 
in due proportion to our numbers, wealth, and enterprise, 
how long would the vices of this city last ? How long 
would men complain of a dead body of divinity and a 
dead church, and a ministry that was dead ? How long 
would Intemperance continue, and Pauperism, in Boston ; 
how long Slavery in this land ? 

Last Sunday, in the name of the Poor, I asked you for 
your charity. To-day I ask for dearer alms : I ask you 
to contribute your Piety. It will help the town more than 
the little money all of us can give. Your money will 
soon be spent ; it feeds one man once ; we cannot give it 
twice, though the blessing thereof may linger long in the 
hand which gave. Few of us can give much money to 
the poor ; some of us none at all. This we can all give : 
the inspiration of a man with a man's Piety in his heart, 
living it out in a man's life. Your money may be ill 
spent, your charity misapplied, but your Piety never. 
After all, there is nothing you can give which men will so 
readily take and so long remember as this. Mothers can 
give it to their daughters and their sons ; men, after 
spending thereof profusely at home, can coin their unex- 
hausted store into industry, patience, integrity, temperance, 
justice, humanity, a practical love of man. A thousand 
years ago, it was easy to excuse men if they chiefly 
showed Religion in the conventional pattern of the church: 
forms then were helps, and the nun has been mother to 
much of the charity of our times ; it is easy to excuse our 
fathers for their superstitious reverence for rites and forms ; 
but now, in an age which has its eyes a little open, a prac- 
tical and a handy age, we are without excuse if our Piety 
appears not in a Manly Life — our Faith in Works. To 
give this Piety to cheer and bless mankind, you must have 



72 

it first, be cheered and blessed thereby yourself. Have 
it, then, in your own way ; put it into your own form. 
Do men tell you, " This is a degenerate age," and " Re- 
ligion is a-dying out " ; tell them that when those stars 
have faded out of the sky from very age, when other 
stars have come up to take their place and they too have 
grown dim and hollow-eyed and old, that Religion will 
still live in Man's heart, the primal, everlasting light of 
all our being. Do they tell you that you must put Piety 
into their forms ; put it there if it be your place ; if not, 
in your place. Let men see the Divinity that is in you by 
the Humanity that comes out from you ; if they will not 
see it, cannot, God can and will. Take from the Past 
courage, not its counsel ; fear not now to be a man. You 
may find a new Eden where you go, a River of God in it, 
and a Tree of Life, an angel to guard it ; not the warn- 
ing angel to repel, but the guiding angel to welcome and 
to bless. 



It was four years yesterday since I first came here to 
speak to you ; I came hesitatingly, reluctant, with much 
diffidence as to my power to do what it seemed to me was 
demanded. I did not come merely to pull down, but to 
build up, though it is plain much theological error must 
be demolished before any great Reform of man's condition 
can be brought about. I came not to contend against 
any man, or sect, or party, but to speak a word for Truth 
and Religion in the name of Man and God. I was in 
bondage to no sect ; you in bondage to none. When a 
boy I learned that there is but one Religion though many 
theologies. I have found it in Christians and in Jews, in 
Quakers and in Catholics. I hope we are all ready to 
honor what is good in each sect, and in rejecting its evil 
not to forget our love and wisdom in our zeal. 

When I came I certainly did not expect to become a 
popular man, or acceptable to many. I had done much 
which in all countries brings odium on a man, though less 
in Boston than in any other part of the world : I had 
rejected the popular theology of Christendom ; I had ex- 



73 

posed the lo^Y morals of Society, had complauicd of the 
want of Piety in its natural form ; I had fatalh^ oifended 
the sect, small in numbers, but respectable for intelligence 
and goodness, in which I was brought up. I came to look 
at the signs of the times from an independent point of 
view, and to speak on the most important of all themes. 
I thought a house much smaller than this would be much 
too large for us. I knew there would be fit audience ; I 
thought it would be few, and the few would soon have 
heard enough and go their ways. 

I know I have some advantages above most clergy- 
men : I am responsible to no sect ; no sect feels responsi- 
ble for me ; I have rejoiced at good things I have seen in 
all sects ; the doctrines which I try to teach do not rest 
on tradition, on miracles, or on any man's authority ; only 
on the Nature of Man. I preach the Natural Laws 
of Man. I appeal to History for illustration, not for 
authority. I have no fear of Philosophy. I am wil- 
ling to look a doubt fairly in the face, and think Rea- 
son is sacred as Conscience, Affection, or the Religious 
Faculty in man. I see a profound Piety in modern sci- 
ence. I have aimed to set forth Absolute Religion, the 
ideal Religion of Human Nature, free Piety, free Good- 
ness, free Thought ; I call that Christianity, after the 
greatest man of the world, one who himself taught it ; 
but I know that this was never the Christianity of the 
churches, in any age. I have endeavoured to teach this 
Religion and apply it to the needs of this time. These 
things certainly give me some advantages over most other 
ministers. Of the disadvantages which are personal to 
myself, I need not speak in public, but some which come 
from my position ought to be noticed with a word. The 
walls of this house, the associations connected with it, fur- 
nish little help to devotion ; we must rely on ourselves 
wholly for that. Other clergymen, by their occasional 
exchanges, can present their hearers with an agreeable 
variety in substance and in form. A single man, often 
heard, becomes wearisome and unprofitable, for " no man 
can feed us always." This I feel to be a great disadvan- 
tage which I labor under. Your kindness and affection- 



74 

ate indulgence make me feel it all the more. But one 
man cannot be twenty men. 

When I came here I knew I should hurt men's feel- 
ings. Mv Theology would prove more offensive and radi- 
cal than men thought ; the freedom of speech which men 
liked at a distance would not be pleasing when near at 
hand ; mj doctrines of Morality I knew could not be 
pleasing to all men — not to all good men. I saw by 
your looks that in my abstractions I did not go too far for 
your sympathy, or too fast for your following. I soon 
found that my highest thought and most pious sentiment 
were most warmly welcomed as such, but when I came to 
put abstract thought and mystical piety into concrete 
goodness, and translate what you had accepted as Chris- 
tian Faith into daily life ; when I came to apply Piety to 
Trade, Politics — Life in general, I knew that I should 
hurt men's feelings. It could not be otherwise. Yet 
I have had a most patient and faithful hearing. One 
thing I must do in my preaching: I must be in earnest. 
I cannot stand here before you and before God, attempt- 
ing to teach Piety and Goodness, and not feel the fire 
and show the fire. The greater the wrong, the more 
popular, the more must I oppose it, and with the clearer, 
abler speech. It is not necessary for me to be popular, 
to be acceptable, even to be loved : it is necessary that I 
should tell the Truth. But let that pass. You come 
hither week after week, it is now year after year that you 
come, to listen to one humble man. Do you get poor in 
your souls ; does your Religion become poor and low ? 
Are you getting less in the qualities of a man ? If so, 
then leave me, to empty seats, to cold and voiceless walls; 
go elsewhere, and feed your souls with a wise passiveness, 
or an activity wiser yet. Such is your duty ; let no af- 
fection for me hinder you from performing it. The same 
theology, the same form suits not all men. But if it is 
not so, if I do you good, if you grow in Mind, and Con- 
science, Heart and Soul, then I ask one thing : let your 
Piety become Natural Life, your Divinity become Hu- 
manity. 



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